London Independent Photography - London Villages Project 

London Villages Project

In March 2011 LIP began a year long photographic project in the run up to the Olympics; over two hundred of its members signed up.

On the one hand the aim of the London Villages Project was to provide a photographic record of London now. While on the other, its purpose was to create a body of work which would be identifiable as a unique contribution to the record of London — its multiplicity of communities, its miscellany of histories, its medley of architecture; its boundaries real and imagined; its current creation, its reference to memory.

To achieve this London was imagined as a collection of villages or communities — a part of London, a small enclave, a street, a square, a terrace, a neck of the woods; taking a place that defines itself; a place apart; a community together; an emotional centre; a home.

The Project is based on the belief that communities seek to distinguish themselves in multitudinous ways; to fashion difference, to embrace dissimilarity, to emphasise variation, to celebrate their rarity and gather together in their uniqueness—communities recognising and acknowledging their separateness and welcoming others to mark it with them.
The photographers spent a year within a closely-observed community. The exhibition is the result; a representation of what moved them within that particular community.

http://www.londonphotography.org.uk