The Same for Everyone by Andy Hall
By (author): Andy Hall
Title: The Same for Everyone
Subtitle: The City of London's Square Mile - a look into the geographic soul of free-market capitalism.
Blurb/Shorttext:
For over 40 years now, Neo-liberalism has come to dominate how our economies, and thus our societies, are run. World-renowned global financial centres such as New York's Wall Street and the City of London's historical financial district known as "The Square Mile" have been at the very heart of these world-wide changes; where the Keynesian post-war consensus rules were ripped and drawn again to favour the free-marketeers of Neo-Liberalism. In the City of London, de-Regulation of the city's financial markets known as "the Big Bang" in 1986 heralded ever crazier boom-bust cycles which have been happening at regular intervals ever since. Huge amounts of money poured into the city from the start of the 1980's which soon produced the stock market crash of 1987 known as "Black Monday". As things gradually recovered, Scandals still played themselves out on the streets of the City of London as the less scrupulous followed the less regulated. Dot com bubbles, property speculation and fraudulent ways of lending vast amounts of money came to the fore in the 2000's as finance and technology raced ahead; culminating in the great banking crisis of 2008/9. This is a look at the fall-out from that great event; watching the London's Square Mile recover in a huge construction boom that still seems to be carrying on, despite all other parts of society (except the 1%) suffering economically.
As the great chronicler of London, Peter Ackroyd said: "It is a city which has the ability to dance on it's own ashes"; which seems to sum up the volatile character of the City of London's Square Mile. Now, the mixed landscape of narrow streets and alleyways next to ancient buildings, juxtaposed with big intersections over-looked by shiny new glass monuments to 21st Century Capitalism; with names like the Shard and the Cheese-Grater and the Walkie-Talkie, fascinate the curious on-looker. Graphic, strongly-lit scenes are conjured up as figures, shadows and silhouettes mix in pockets of light and light reflections from buildings onto the streets below.
They say nothing stands still in this most dynamic part of London, which has largely danced to it's own tune, but things are happening to it that are beyond it's control. It has survived the Banking crisis of 2008/9, and is adapting slowly to Brexit, but the Covid crisis and it's subsequent lockdown has accelerated the already changing pattern of working life in the digital age that has been unfolding in recent years; and it remains to be seen how this fabled area in the heart of London will again adapt...
The body of work containing the photographs that appear in this book have won Andy the Best Author award at the prestigious Trieste Photo Days 2025 festival curated by legendary Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert. He praised Andy's work, stating: "I chose this work because it's the kind of photos i'd love to have taken myself . I've photographed around London's Business District and his work captures the atmosphere perfectly. His compositions stand out. He's pulling order from chaos, and some images are truly powerful".
ISBN: 978-87-7620-330-6
Book language: English
Publishing house: Snap Collective
Website: www.snap-collective.com
Editorial Assistant: Valentina Furtuna
Designer: Irina Furtuna
Published on: 09/03/2024
Category: Art
Price (€): 89
Keywords: Street photography, Photographic art, City of London