For more than a decade, the name of a single Blackburn neighbourhood — Bank Top — has been hauled into national argument, flattened into a byword for segregation. Craig Easton’s Bank Top answers that shorthand with slow, patient attention. Working in an area less than half a mile square across 2019 and 2020, Easton used a large-format wooden field camera, a method that requires time, conversation and consent. He returned over long days and weeks, talking with residents before making pictures, so that portraiture and landscape accumulate as acquaintance rather than extraction.

The book sets those black-and-white photographs beside writing by Abdul Aziz Hafiz, whose poetry and essay are joined by the testimonies of residents. The result is deliberately multi-voiced: a long-form collaboration that treats image, text and speech as equal carriers of meaning. Social deprivation, housing, unemployment, immigration and representation are acknowledged as material conditions, alongside the long reach of past and present foreign policy, without allowing any single frame to stand in for a whole life.

Bank Top was published by GOST Books in 2022 as a 134-page hardback, and was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards (Author Category) and the Aperture PhotoBook Award (First PhotoBook). That recognition points to what distinguishes the project: it is a considered response to how places like this are discussed by media and government, and a sustained attempt to let a community tell its own story.

For collectors, the interest lies in the conjunction of format and ethic. The camera’s deliberateness matches the book’s refusal of shorthand; the sequencing of portrait, place and testimony builds a collective portrait rather than a portfolio of types. It sits within a documentary tradition while questioning the terms on which that tradition has often been granted.