Hannah Norton celebrates the humanity and spirit of the characters that shaped north London’s Community Cook Up

A project that ran from 2017 to 2023, The Community Cook Up was a food bank and community meeting point to gather and share a warm meal weekly on Northumberland Park Estate in Tottenham, North London. It was in 2021, when the documentary photographer Hannah Norton was coming up to her fourth year of volunteering for the project that The Cook Up’s founder, Alison Davy, proposed the idea of her doing a community photo project.

“Our community was made up of wonderful people, and she knew the value and impact a portrait could have on someone’s feelings of pride and belonging,” shares Hannah. “I had no idea of the shape the project would take or the impact it would have but it began (and continued) with me taping up some white fabric to a wall in the community centre.”

For the better part of a year, the photographer proceeded to document different members of the community that had formed around the Cook Up, shooting on film to capture stripped back black-and-white portraits that became a frame to capture all kinds of characters. In the process of composing each portrait, the photographer spoke to participants about their lives and experiences, getting to know the all too familiar locals again, in a new way. This growing sense of connection and closeness led her to eventually break out of a studio set up in the last few months of the project and pursue a few environmental portraits with people that she had made ties with throughout the project.

These images were captured in places like people’s homes or local parks – where they spoke at length with Hannah about what The Cook Up truly meant to them. “It was important these conversations happened outside of The Cook Up, the portraits that happened there were fun and an escape for a few minutes, I didn’t want to weigh it down with heavy conversations but felt it was important to have the voices of members of the community,” the photographer shares.

This same sense of separation informed Hannah’s approach to shooting inside the centre. Excluding the context of the food bank with her white backdrop and focusing on the people alone “was a kind of projection I think”, the photographer shares. “I knew these people, knew what they were going through, and often people were there because they were going through a tough time. I didn’t want their portrait to be tied to a period of time in their lives that was painful. I wanted the series to be a celebration of their humanity and spirit, so they can look at these images forever and feel really proud of who they are.”

A portrait from the project that really stands out to Hannah was Stella’s. A community member she saw week in week out who was in her late seventies and living in a local hostel, Stella had been without secure housing for over a decade. “For years Stella relentlessly advocated for herself in the hope that she would be moved,” Hannah shares. “I found out that the week before she asked me to have her picture taken she had been moved into her own flat. You can see how wonderful she looked that day, she was so proud and happy and wanted to remember this moment.”

In many ways this was a project that taught Hannah how to be behind a camera. Positioning herself as the quiet observer, the process of making these photographs was to “watch someone go from nervous and withdrawn to confident and expressive in the space of 10 minutes, and that brought me so much Joy”, she shares, “to be able to change someone’s relationship with what having their photo taken means to them is special. It really made me believe in the power of a portrait and what that can do for someone’s confidence and sense of worth.”

The photographer displayed the series at a street side exhibition at Coal Drops Yard in London late last year and combined the images and interviews that shaped The Community Cookup into a printed publication, distributed by Then There Was Us with the help of Panopus Printing Studio. The book sold out after its first print run with a percentage of profits directed back into the community and Hannah now has ambitions to make a second edition so that the project can reach more people in print.

“The opening night of the show was beautiful, so many people from the cook up came down to see the work and they were getting recognised and treated like celebrities. It was just such a thrill to see, and for other people to get to experience the magic of The Cook Up community too,” Hannah ends. “I hope the message the images hold is that we all have a shared humanity and it is how we treat one another that counts for something, not the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”