Travellers' Children

The Genesis cinema is proud to present Colin O’Brien’s Travellers’ Children, a series of photographs of travellers in East London taken 25 years ago in 1987.

Colin O’Brien says: “I came across the travellers whilst I was photographing a deserted warehouse in the London Fields area. They had parked their caravans, in and around, Martello Street near the railway arches by the station. This part of Hackney was very run down in the late 1980′s. The streets were littered with rubbish and many of the decaying Victorian terraces were being demolished.

The travellers were Irish, mostly families with three or four children, living in utilitarian caravans, which looked extremely cramped but comfortable. On the first week I started to take one or two Polaroid shots of the children which I gave to them to show their parents. Some of the parents then dressed the children up and sent them out to my open air studio in Fortescue Avenue.

I continued to take many more pictures over a period of three weeks and got to know some of the travellers well. They took me into their confidence and trusted me with their children. It was only when I started to print the images that I realised what an amazing set of photographs they were.

When I returned to the site on the fourth week the families had gone. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. After all, this is what travellers do, they move on. I had no way of contacting them, but I was left with a set of images which are now an important part of my archive...”

For a previous exhibition, Art Critic, Joanna Pitman wrote in the Times newspaper that “the photographs possessed eloquence, grace, drama and visual wit”, saying that “the photographer had a remarkable eye for the world around him”, comparing his work with Roger Mayne, Bill Brandt, Cartier-Bresson and Thurston Hopkins.