A History of the East End by Chris Dorley Brown

Text in English and French
Graphic design : Marie Pellaton
18x29,5 cm, 152 pages - september 2024
ISBN 978-2-9572072-4-4

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PLUS D’INFOS

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"A fabulous tribute to a constantly ruined and renewed area of London that has found its ideal chronicler. Light and dust, cloud and fire, tower block and underpass: stoic compositions give the dignity of permanence to a zone of perpetual transition. You can taste it, breathe it. Walk it. And come to believe that the experience is somehow richer and riper than the real thing." (Iain Sinclair)

"[Chris Dorley Brown] is a wonderful writer with a natural and unpretentious voice. It sounds like he’s sitting next to you in the pub, telling tales over a pint of beer, sometimes playful, sometimes profound. (…) It’s a wonderful, meandering, theatrical series of images, a mixture of architectural and social documentary photography with a vaguely mysterious atmosphere hovering over them." (Colin Dutton)

"If you have lived in Hackney, you will feel the photographs intimately. If you have not, you will appreciate the nearly cinematic set pieces that Dorley Brown crafts." (Brad Feuerheim)

Chris Dorley Brown has documented London's East End all his life. Today, we are delighted to present this collection in a retrospective book - the photographer's first monograph.

Chris Dorley Brown is a self-taught British documentary photographer, based in London's East End. His cultural education was formed in East London in the late 1970s, against a backdrop of highly polarized political conflict and change.

The photographs presented in this book - almost 100 - were taken between 1984 and 2023. The journey through the book is like taking a stroll: starting on the banks of the Thames, we discover the vernacular architecture of the 1980s; their demolition a few years later; followed by more recent architecture. We follow the transformations brought about by construction for the Olympic Games; then, the deserted streets during lockdown; ending on the banks of the Thames, almost at its mouth. One-offs, here and there, intersperse these main themes.
Texts and leaflets are included in the book. The author recounts his career with a certain ease: the depictions are very visual, and anecdotes are related side-by-side with his most profound thoughts.

For Chris Dorley Brown, saudade is the word that best sums up this work, a story that Native Americans taled and sang to each other as they traveled.

Press
Brad Feuerheim for American Suburbx
Hackney Citizen
TimeOut
Londonist
Colin Dutton's blog
The Sound of Photography (Podcast)

Nouveau Palais is the name of a diner on the corner of Bernard Street and Parc Avenue in Montreal. Facing that sign, one cold day of 2019, I thought I just found the name of my not yet started éditions. In my idea, the new palace won’t look like the old one (l’Élysée for instance in France). Plead for the destroy of the old palaces and to build something else different and for all that was the image behind catching that restaurant name.
Regarding the photobooks, Nouveau Palais tries to push ways of doing politically pictures and not political pictures to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard. Each publication is a well thought balance between photographs, book form and texts and a close collaboration between the photographer, the author, the graphic designer, which is Marie Pellaton for most titles, and me, the publisher.
Books are not an end for the publishing house. An online review, distribution, podcasts, and a constant correspondences with the growing circle of the éditions are few of the many ways to spread the ideas and build a happy publishing process with modest means.

Yves Drillet


Web Credits
Design : Juliette Duhé et Sébastien Riollier
Code : Élie Quintard and Zoé Lecossois

Each image in this book is an experiment, an adventure, a trip in a time machine, a possible
answer to a question that you had never been asked. They aim to record and preserve, an ongoing archive of east London’s cycle of shrinkage and expansion, triumph and failure. To be put away and viewed later when the dust has settled. To let the intervening time infuse the image with mystery and seduction.”

Chris Dorley Brown