Craig Easton is a British photographer who lives in The Wirral and works on long-term social documentary projects that deal with the representation of communities in the North of England.[1][2][3] He has made work about women working in the UK fish processing industry; about the inter-generational nature of poverty and economic hardship in Northern England; about social deprivation, housing, unemployment and immigration in Blackburn; and about how the situation in which young people throughout the UK live, influences their aspirations.
He began his photography career working as a photojournalist at The Independent newspaper in the early 1990s. For an article in 1992, Easton made black and white photographs of the Williams family in Blackpool that "exposed Thatcherism's legacy of child poverty."[1] In 1997, he left The Independent and pursued more long-term photography projects.[10]
Fisherwomen, made between 2013 and at least 2017[13] using a large format film camera, references the early social documentary photography of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. In 1843 Hill and Adamson photographed the Newhaven fishwives who processed caught fish. Easton's project follows the historical trail of itinerant workers who followed the traditional herring fleet, from Unst in Shetland to Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Fisherwomen documents, in colour, the connection between previous generations and contemporary workers, still largely women, now almost all working indoors in processing factories and smokehouses.[14][15]
From 2016 to 2020 he again found and photographed three generations of the Williams family in the North of England, in a series in colour about the inter-generational nature of poverty and economic hardship.[1]
Since 2019 Easton has been documenting the neighbourhood of Bank Top in Blackburn.[16] His black and white portraits, and occasional landscapes, made within about a 500 m radius, highlight social deprivation, housing, unemployment and immigration. The work is accompanied by text by local writer and researcher Abdul Aziz Hafiz. The series is part of an initiative by Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, called Kick Down the Barriers, in which artists and writers collaborate with residents of Blackburn in representing their community. The initiative is a response to a 2007 BBC Panorama TV programme that claimed Blackburn was "one of the most segregated towns in Britain". This view has persisted in media representation of the town ever since, but locals refute it. Easton is using an 8×10 large format film camera for the work.[2][10][17] It was published as a book in 2022.[18]
Sixteen was a group photography project conceived and led by Easton where by he and fifteen other photographers collaborated with 16-year-olds from various social backgrounds all around the UK. The young people responded to questions about what it means to be sixteen.[19][20] "The work challenges the notion of meritocracy and examines how social background, ethnicity, gender, location, education, health etc all influence what young people think they can achieve in life." The other photographers were Linda Brownlee, David Copeland, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Christopher Nunn, Kelly O'Brien, Kate Peters, Michelle Sank, Abbie Trayler-Smith, Simon Roberts and Robert C Brady.[21] The work was shown in galleries and outdoors all over the UK in 2019/20.
Publications
Publications by Easton
Fisherwomen. Ten O'Clock, 2020. Edition of 500 copies.[14]Portfolio format.
Bank Top. London: Gost, 2022. ISBN978-1-910401-68-2. With an essay and field notes by Abdul Aziz Hafiz.[22]
