Freya Najade and Jenny Lewis: Projects, Portraits and Everyday Life

Jenny Lewis and Freya Najade both work in east London, both publish with the same local press, and both build their work slowly out of what is immediately around them. Lewis photographs people at particular moments in their lives. Najade photographs the city's edges, its water and its overgrown ground. Their names appear together on this address because they spoke at a London photography talk in September 2017; what follows is an introduction to the work itself.

Jenny Lewis

Jenny Lewis is a portrait photographer based in Hackney. Her publisher's biography records that she moved to the borough over twenty years ago after studying for a Fine Art degree at Preston, and that she has since made her living as an editorial photographer while continuing a parallel strand of personal work rooted in east London.

She is best known for One Day Young, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2015 as the fifth title in its East London Photo Stories series. The book collects portraits of women with their newborn children, each made in the mother's own home within 24 hours of the birth. Reviewing it on 5 June 2015, the Hackney Citizen reported that Lewis had photographed 150 Hackney women at home with their one-day-old babies over the preceding five years, and that 40 of those portraits were published in the book. The review also notes what the series does cumulatively rather than frame by frame, observing that the similarities between the pictures only emerge across the sequence.

Two decisions shape the work. The women were, in practice, her neighbours, and the pictures were made in their own flats rather than a studio. The 24 hour window is also a decision to photograph after the event rather than during it, which produces calm pictures of a subject usually shown as drama.

Her second book with the same publisher, Hackney Studios, took a different route through the same borough. Over four years she photographed painters, illustrators, filmmakers, jewellers, ceramicists and fashion designers in their working spaces. The publisher describes how the project grew from a chance encounter with the fashion designer Isobel Webster into something like a family tree, with each artist nominating the next person to be photographed. The book also carries a note from Lewis that many of the artists in it had since been forced out of their studios by steep rent increases, which turns a set of portraits into a record of a shifting local economy.

Freya Najade

Freya Najade is a German photographer who works between London and Hamburg. Her publisher records that she graduated in photojournalism and documentary photography from the London College of Communication in 2009, and that her work has appeared in The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, The Times, Die Zeit and Le Monde. Her own portfolio is at freyanajade.com.

Her second book, Along the Hackney Canal (Hoxton Mini Press, 2016), follows the waterways of east London from the Regent's Canal to the River Lea. The Hackney Citizen reviewed it on 5 September 2016. It is a book about a kind of place that is neither park nor street, where industrial leftovers, water and plant life sit next to housing.

She returned to the same ground at larger scale with The Hackney Marshes, a cloth bound monograph with an introduction by Rosalind Jana. The publisher describes it as a journey through meadows, riverbanks, abandoned infrastructure and football pitches, photographing both the overgrown spaces themselves and the people who use them. Najade has also made work beyond London. Her series Jazorina, published by Kehrer Verlag, documents a former lignite mining region in eastern Germany that is being converted into a lake district, which is landscape photography about a landscape still being built.

Her work also exists outside books. Vital Arts, the arts organisation of Barts Health NHS Trust, commissioned Najade for Newham University Hospital, placing photographs of the marshes and waterways in a clinical setting. Commissions of that kind are a significant part of how landscape work reaches an audience in Britain, and they rarely appear in exhibition histories.

The local long project as a form

Both photographers publish with Hoxton Mini Press, an independent press founded in 2013 by the photographer Martin Usborne and Ann Waldvogel. Its own account is that it never intended to be a business and began only as a way to tell a story about a neighbourhood. That model matters to the work here, because a project built on living in the same streets as its subjects for years rarely fits a commissioning budget, while a small repeatable book format can carry it. Usborne's own photography is covered on our page for Luke Archer, Stuart Freedman and Martin Usborne, and other photographers of the period are listed in the speakers index and the archive of past talks.

This site is an independent journal and is not connected with the former PhotoForum talks group. We do not organise events.