One community: 100 intimate portraits capturing life’s universal moments in a vibrant pocket of east London

A Hackney-based photographer’s series stars local strangers, and paints a picture of a diverse community. Jenny Lewis tells Olivia Campbell about finding the extraordinary in the everyday

It’s no exaggeration that the British sense of community is slowly dwindling. While a lucky few truly get to know their neighbours, around two-thirds of Britons admit they hardly know those living next to them. Beyond the occasional “hello” or an even rarer conversation, we’re basically strangers to each other.

In an attempt to shine a light on her local community, Hackney-based photographer Jenny Lewis has painstakingly photographed people at every age from zero to 100. “When you start taking portraits of random people you begin to realise that there’s something extraordinary in ordinary life,” says Lewis. “Everyone has their story and something you can learn from them.”

Now her dynamic images have been published in a new photobook by Hoxton Mini Press. Titled One Hundred Years: Portraits of a community aged 0-100, this series of vignettes paint a picture of vibrant and diverse individuals.

The project slowly began to morph into One Hundred Years after Lewis met Nellie, a 105-year-old woman “sparkling away with conversation”. Although she was only there for 15 minutes to shoot a Mother’s Day portrait, Lewis found that Nellie had changed her entire outlook: “I couldn’t believe you could live like this at 105, completely independent and with so much energy. [Nellie] changed my views on old age. It’s not just sitting in a chair, just quietly fading away. You’re actually quite vital.”

After several projects came to end and coupled with a desire to take pictures of people she knew nothing about, Lewis began finding subjects that were no where near her own age. Some subjects were found by approaching strangers she encountered, others came from recommendations from people she photographed.

“I wanted to get inside other people’s heads and seek different experiences,” the photographer explains. “There’s something about not knowing anything about who you’re capturing [Lewis would sometimes arrange shoots without having met her subject]. You’re throwing yourself in and anything can happen.”

There are many people to learn about, from 100-year-old Renee who married a gangster when she was 21, to 36-year-old Rosy who discovered she had cancer while pregnant with her son. There’s trauma, there’s hope and there’s life in all 100 stories.

One subject that has particularly resonated with Lewis is that of seven-year-old Jack. He loves pink, the reader is told, and loves the tutu his mother bought him. “I was blown away by him,” she explains. “We spoke for two hours about portraiture and body language and I left the house thinking, ‘That was a seven-year-old, not an adult.’

“Even with young people, who might not have much in the way of stories, there’s a rawness, an openness, that you might have forgotten through all the layers you’ve gathered along the way.”

Spending time with each person has resulted in unique perspectives on things that impact individuals’ lives. Each image is accompanied by quotes from the subjects, and while Lewis is clear she doesn’t “want to share reams and reams of information”, snippets of conversations that have surfaced help challenge preconceptions of people. “You just listen and talk to people and you soon realise that everyone is complex.”

‘One Hundred Years: Portraits of a community aged 0-100’ is published by Hoxton Mini Press