For the past seven years the Observer photographer Andy Hall has been wandering the City of London with his camera – post-Brexit, through the eerie emptiness of the pandemic and beyond – to document the changing faces of the capital’s former citadel; home to about 8,000 people, daily workplace for about 600,000 more. His pictures, now collected in a fabulous book, The Same for Everyone, examine the atmosphere and soul of the engine of the British economy, with its exposed Roman foundations and its thicket of tabloid-named towers (the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie) jostling for head space above the vaults of the Bank of England.
This 2023 image of a gaggle of City visitors with the peak of the Shard behind them conjures some of the airier strangeness of that landscape, in which bright minds spend long days at terminals trying to bend figures in their favour. The group here appear to have come upon this odd civilisation unexpectedly and are in search of bearings and landmarks.
Hall’s City pictures won the prestigious best author prize at the recent Trieste festival, judged by Magnum photography star Harry Gruyaert, who described them as “the kind of photos I’d love to have taken myself … pulling order from chaos”. Some of this order is all about estrangement. In one of Hall’s images a feral wolfhound lopes among the morning commuters, a restless spirit of place; in another a silhouetted bird spreads its wings over the City skyscrapers like a portent of doom. Hall’s City workers, often frozen in snatched lunchtime moments of contemplation, or trapped in sudden startling glass and steel geometries, move among and within the shadows and mirrors of what Boris Johnson called the “phallocratic” Square Mile. You are reminded by some of those street-level crowd scenes of that urgent invocation in the dystopian eco movie Don’t Look Up.
• The Same for Everyone is published by Snap Collective
