ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY are not usually part of Loving Dalston’s remit (where would it end?) but an exception has been made for The Corners.

This is an online exhibition by Hackney photographer Chris Dorley-Brown and, as you may infer from the pic above, his work is outstanding. 

Its painterly quality is reminiscent of the work of many artists, including, for example, Edward (Nighthawks) Hopper (1882-1967), in their sophisticated mixure of ultra-realism with surrealism. 

Yet the viewer is fully aware that it is a creation they are viewing: Dorley-Brown often combines many images to make one final picture. 

He lived in Dalston from 1980, moving to south Hackney in 1990, from where he deploys his Nikon D200, a single lens reflex digital camera, on projects about Kingsland and Hackney Wick. 

Nostalgists may also enjoy what could be called Dorley-Brown’s record shots of changing Hackney. Some of these are high-quality black-and-whites, with the special quality that seems to come from no other photographic process. 
They also offer fascinating glimpses of 1980s fashions in clothing and, for boys, in motor transport.

David Altheer 141110

* Press on these links: The Corners; earlier photographs

* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained. Most photographs can be visually enlarged by pressing on them.