There’s something not quite right about the photographs in Chris Dorley-Brown’s book “The Corners” (published by Hoxton Mini Press). The scenes are ordinary enough — intersections in East London with people going about their normal business — but there’s a tranced stillness about them: a feeling of being in some kind of fugue state. I’m referring not only to the people in the pictures; I’m also describing the effect induced in us, the people looking at them. And when I said there was something not right about them, maybe I meant the exact opposite: something too right, eerily ordinary.
Of all the things to photograph, people stuck in traffic jams during the middle of the summer doesn’t really sound like a lot of fun. But Chris Dorley-Brown did just that over the course of two summers in the mid-1980s in East London for what was initially an assignment to photograph the privatization of Rolls Royce. What caught his attention were the traffic jams around the financial district, only a couple of weeks before Margaret Thatcher’s third and final landslide victory.
