Jenny Lewis spent three years moving in and out of studios across Hackney, photographing artists in the rooms where the work actually gets made. Illustrators, filmmakers, jewellers, ceramicists and fashion designers sit for her, and alongside the portraits they talk about how they think and what the process asks of them. The result is less a survey of a borough than a picture of a working community, made while that community was still in place.

The book has an unusual architecture. It began with a single portrait, of the fashion designer Isobel Webster, and grew outward as each sitter nominated the next — a family tree of makers rather than a curator’s list. Read in sequence, the photographs accumulate into something close to a map of a creative neighbourhood and the informal networks that hold it together.

Lewis was working in East London during a period of rapid change. Many of the people she photographed have since been forced out of their studios as rents rose, a pressure she has spoken about. That knowledge sits behind the portraits without overwhelming them: the rooms still look used, the sitters still absorbed in their own problems. The book records a particular London, and also a mood — resourceful, communal, precarious.

Hoxton Mini Press published it in 2017 as a 112-page hardcover. For collectors drawn to photographs about labour, place and community, its interest lies in the method: a three-year commitment, a chain of introductions rather than an assignment, and a set of portraits that carry the texture of the moment in which they were made.