The market at Camden Lock in north London has for 50 years been trading in trends and nostalgia. Near the site of the horse hospital that once cared for animals pulling canal barges, the modern market was established with 16 stalls in 1974 and soon became – knocking off styles from Kings Road – the primary home of London’s punk counterculture. Ever since, regulars and traders have informed newcomers and tourists that the market is not what it was. When Tony Kearns took this picture at a handbag stall at the market in 1989, Camden was already selling past images of itself. The bulldog on the punter’s shoulder captures that mood well: Camden has seen it all before.
Kearns, inspired by the great street photographers Robert Doisneau, Josef Koudelka and Mary Ellen Mark, spent a lot of time between 1987 and 1994 touring London markets looking for characters and moments to photograph. In some pictures, traders have lined up bric-a-brac on the pavement or on a garden wall in hope of making a few quid. The best of that archive of images are collected in a new book, Stall Life, which captures that time when the traditional London street markets – Berwick Street and Brixton and Columbia Road, as well as Camden – still had an unlicensed, ad hoc quality, removed from the more organised destinations into which they have evolved.
“I am attracted to capturing stalled time in my photographs, when people pause to reflect, read or daydream,” Kearns says. “Street and covered markets are full of pauses, long ones endured by patient stallholders waiting for custom or the short ones of prospective customers as they stop to examine the stuff for sale.” His camera was always restless for faces – even canine ones – in the chaos, “centres of calm amid the teeming crowds streaming past”.
• Stall Time is published by Hi Tone Books (€30)
