Between 1977 and 1992, and most intensively during the 1980s, Paul Trevor walked the streets of east London with a camera held close enough to fill the frame with a stranger’s face. In Your Face gathers that work in black and white, and the title is a fair description of the method: these are not portraits made from a comfortable distance but encounters in which photographer and subject are almost touching.

The sequence sets two economies beside each other. Brick Lane’s street market — traders, shoppers, families going about a Saturday — is placed against the City, London’s money market, roughly a mile away and a world apart in wealth and expectation. Trevor’s motivation was partly political: the photographs were made largely under Margaret Thatcher, when the argument between market forces and community values ran at its sharpest. The class divide they describe is not analysed from outside. It is registered at arm’s length, in faces.

That closeness is what makes the pictures hold. A quarter-century of returning to the same streets gives the book a cumulative weight no single season of shooting could produce, and it is the order of the photographs, rather than any individual frame, that carries the argument.

Hoxton Mini Press issued the book in 2020 as a hardcover of about 128 pages, in modest dimensions — roughly 22 by 16 centimetres — with a cloth spine. The photographs have also circulated as an exhibition series. For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction of a sustained documentary project with a deliberately intimate format: a body of work about looking at people directly, printed at a size that keeps that directness intact.