FOTO8

The Family is a three-year journey in pictures that came about in the wake of a project shot by Jocelyn Bain Hogg in 2008, documenting the disturbing gun and knife crime issues around Britain’s youth.

Bain Hogg's foray into the underworld of organised crime began with his seminal work The Firm, published as a book in 2003. Eight years on, The Family is an intimate look into the life of one underworld family, revealing a far more circumspect world than the vaudeville pageant of the old villains.

Joe Pyle senior and the Kray twins, the old-school Godfathers of British crime, have died since The Firm was completed in 2001. And in 2008 Bain Hogg found a fractured society of British criminals with little or no organisation and leadership, vainly competing, as many businesses have to do, with international competition.

Russians, Albanians, Kosovans and Turks rule the UK underworld now but the indigenous villains, the scions of the Pyle family, still wear their heritage on their sleeves, talking business at unlicenced boxing matches and night clubs and working with their Jamaican brothers - the Yardies - for a slice of the criminal pie.

The 18th Century artist and reformer William Hogarth set the precedent for documenting this dark underbelly of society and in 21st Century Britain, little has changed. The guns and drugs still flourish on our estates but the empire that once controlled them is in decline and fall. These pictures show the lives of ‘The Family’ - the gangsters and players, writ large as the world changes irrevocably around them.

The Family, published by Foto8, is out December 2011. Copies of the book are available to purchase here as well as the limited edition book, complete with signed 16x20in print.


Jocely Bain Hogg
The Family
8 December 2011 - 14 January 2012

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For press images email lauren [at] foto8.com