The East End Archive at the Cass holds projects or bodies of work from artists and photographers such as Jo Spence and Tom Hunter, aspects of whose practices have been concerned with the East End of London and its diaspora; the East End is seen as both a geographic and conceptual space, interpreted as a perpetually shifting frontier where dreams, dissent and transformation co-exist. Traditional and historic views together with the newly fashionable status of certain areas of the East End are also explored. 'Archive: Imagining the East End' comprises a wide variety of approaches to photographic work in representing the area drawn from preliminary deposits within the archive. It is accompanied by essays by leading academics, photographers and archivists which investigate the concept of a photographic archive in historical and theoretical contexts. "Cities have always presented opportunities for transformation?. The East End?our east end?has been, at least since Gustav Dore's London Pilgrimage of 1872, a territory perpetually in need of transformation, vicious and semi-criminal, a dark continent off-limits to all but the most intrepid missionaries and pioneers. As parts of it have succumbed to gentrification by way of romantic ruin, so 'East End' has moved outwards, beyond Shoreditch, beyond Whitechapel, beyond the Isle of Dogs, beyond Hackney. In fact 'East End' is in reality a state of mind, the necessary frontier of 'regeneration' wherever that may be?" D Howells. Activate 4, 2008. ILLUSTRATIONS: 80 colour and b/w
