Dominoes gathers a decade of Roland Ramanan’s photographs made around Gillett Square, a corner of Hackney in London’s East End whose fortunes shifted when it became an experiment in urban regeneration during the 1990s. Ramanan began working there in 2012 and has kept faith with the place since. The book’s subjects are the people who live in and pass through the square: neighbours, families, lovers, men and women negotiating addiction and hardship, and the ordinary sociability that survives alongside them. He photographs inside homes as well as on the street, which is why the pictures carry the weight of long permission rather than the hurry of a passing assignment.

The title is not decorative. Dominoes are played in the square, and the game supplies Ramanan with a figure for lives that are precarious and interdependent, where one turn alters the next. The sequencing holds sadness and hope in the same frame of reference rather than resolving one into the other, and the book is candid about loss: some of the people pictured have died, and others have become the photographer’s friends.

The photographs are printed as 104 duotone plates across 150 pages. The clothbound hardback, designed by Victoria Forrest of VIKA Books and published by Dewi Lewis in 2024, sets the images alongside texts by Richard Yeboa and Ramanan and a poem by Ian McMillan, so that testimony and poetry share the page with the pictures instead of illustrating them.

For a collector, the interest lies in the compound of duration, access and design. Ten years inside one London square is an unusual commitment, and it produces a portrait of a community under pressure from regeneration that is neither sentimental nor documentary in the distanced sense. The book’s structure — photograph, testimony, poem — argues that a neighbourhood is known through several kinds of speech at once.