Bethnal Green: The City as a Catwalk in Art

When I was walking along Bethnal Green Road and saw this stylish woman walking towards me, I was immediately reminded of the few occasions when I have photographed models on the catwalk. As drag artist and performer RuPaul says, “The world is your catwalk, so just remember that when you’re out there.”

This striking encounter on Bethnal Green Road inspired this hybrid of street photography, collage and graphic abstraction. The work begins with two street photographs made in 2024, but the final image moves well beyond documentary photography into a constructed psychological space. Rather than simply recording a place, it evokes the sensation of moving through a city that has itself become a catwalk.

The vivid electric greens, blues, yellows and magentas bear little relationship to the natural world, yet they could easily belong to a colour scheme created through the lighting and visual design of a fashion show. Here, they function symbolically rather than descriptively. My subject remains grounded in lived reality, while the saturated background becomes an imagined, emotional environment. The contrast between the monochrome figure and the intense colour heightens the tension between observation and invention, reality and fantasy.

I wanted to create an image that feels both rooted in the streets of East London and liberated from them. The work suggests that identity is not fixed, but continually performed, imagined and reconstructed as we move through the urban environment.