The Silverprint Gallery - Deep Sleep - Ben Smith, 'A Tale Of Two Cities'

DEEP SLEEP
Deep Sleep is an online photography magazine founded by and featuring work from a small group of London based collaborators and showcasing a diverse range of contemporary photography from emerging young talents in search of an outlet for their work to experienced award winning and exhibited contributors. 

This project is a portrait of the London borough of Tower Hamlets. It is a vibrant, ever changing place with an ethnically diverse, multi-cultural population comprising everyone from several generations of ‘cockneys’ to a large immigrant Bangladeshi community. It also plays host to a striking dichotomy in which the average annual salary of those who work there is £58,000 which is the second highest in the U.K. after the City of London, one of the world’s main financial hubs, yet over 48% of the Borough’s children live in poverty. How can both of these statistics be true? The figures are skewed by Canary Wharf, a small patch of land at the northern tip of the Isle of Dogs, otherwise one of London’s most deprived regions. This mirage of gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers created from scratch in the 1980’s on what was then a run-down industrial wasteland is London’s other financial centre, home to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions to which 100,000 workers commute every day. The resulting discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, from bespoke-suited young alpha males with six figure salaries on the trading floors of investment banks to impoverished pensioners on run-down council estates, is a story of stark contrasts which creates a tale of two cities.

I really like these photographs as they show the changes of issues of this current time in the UK, covering immigration, multicultural society, even from showing the working wealthy class to the poor children on the streets of London. This series covers the genre of documentary photography, almost like snapshots of the everyday real life.

These photographs seem like snapshots however I believe that the photographer has taken into account exactly what he shows in each shot and frame, from show a couple next in front of a flash car to show wealth and money to then show one child playing in the street near a boarded up house to show the poorer side of the city. Again addressing multicultural issues as well as religion, with a large Muslim family in one shot and in the next is some British flag bunting hanging outside another house.  

I really liked this series of work however I didn't feel much effort went into how it was displayed, they just seemed like standard prints pined to the wall with small pins in each corner of the image. I fill maybe if there was a way we could of interacted with the images such as having to appear through a window to see whats outside would have been an interesting way of looking at the work. They could have even put the work in frames to take away from the photographs just feeling like snapshots.