Stephen Gill: The Wick

Hackney Wick lies between the Eastway A106, the Grand Union Canal, and the River Lea. It's a bleak and desolate place which fifteen years ago boasted a speedway track and greyhound stadium and has new aspirations as a site of the 2012 Olympic Games. In the meantime, on Sundays, it has become home to a sprawling, impromptu market, known locally simply as the 'black market', which has grown to giant proportions.

Part-scrap yard, part-car boot sale, part-flea market, here in The Wick the detritus of the inner city finds its way to the edges to be sifted and sorted, recycled and bartered, often by people living outside the city's official economies. Exhausted white goods, mountains of computer chips, yards of copper wire stripped from derelict buildings and defunct electronic equipment: the scraps and shards of hi-tech and industrial waste join piles of ersatz designer handbags and trainers, as well as a stew of personal possessions that many people come to sell week after week. In the economic anarchy of The Wick (with a brisk trade in mobile phone unlocking, it's an anarchy that sometimes borders on the illegal), everything has a certain value, even if that value is endlessly fugitive and fickle. What starts the day as a desirable commodity can be easily abandoned at the end as so much rubbish. Hackney has long provided a refuge for immigrants and asylum seekers from all over the world, and nowhere is the area's cultural richness reflected more clearly than at The Wick, with its endlessly diverse traders and buyers - English, African, Albanian, Romanian, Bengali, Bangladeshi, Polish, Somali, Turkish, Jewish and Vietnamese among them.

In January, the young British photographer Stephen Gill purchased a Bakelite camera at the market for 50p and has used it, over several months, to document The Wick's strangely self-sufficient world and the frenetic activity of the people who occupy it. A plastic camera with a plastic case and lens, the camera has no focus or exposure controls. Its no-frills technology mirrors the functionality of the market itself and Gill's resulting photographs exploit the spontaneous effects of the camera to reflect the energy and chaos and - faced with closure in July when the market's licence expires - the fragility of the environment.

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971 and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1993. His photographs have appeared in many international journals including The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The Sunday Times, The Observer Magazine and The Guardian Weekend. His work has appeared in exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery and Agnès B, Galerie du Jour, Paris.

Kate Bush Senior Programmer

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Stephen Gill: The Wick