I am attached to this book by David Wilson in an almost affectionate way — not only because I curated it, but above all because I lived through its genesis some years ago in London, when David’s work was still far from being an editorial project and looked more like a nebula of medium-format contact sheets pinned to the walls of a rented room around Leyton, in the east of the English capital. An area I knew well, having lived there years before, and which I found formidably described in that multitude of shots. It was in those spring days spent with David, talking late into the night about his work on the modern city and walking through the suburbs, that we laid the foundations of the dialogue that has brought us here. It is not easy to sum up an investigative project drawing on a vast archive to which this book does only partial justice. If I had to summarize its meaning: David, through photography, questions the paradigm of the periphery as a metropolitan non-place. He deliberately lingers on the folds of London’s eastern edge and, placing himself at the margin, tries to articulate its meaning — not vitiated by vernacular attention or easy conclusions, but driven by curiosity toward what is human. The people caught in their unpredictable, simple distractions give life and grace back to urban settings often judged grey and unimportant. The book opens with an image, shot from afar and from behind a fence, of Canary Wharf, erected as a symbol of a certain speculative utopia. His is an accidental vision, free of prejudice, drawing strength from minor collisions, from unplanned instants. The tension released by the unprestructured relationship between space and its inhabitant fuels the narrative — the same tension that fed, as Paul Newland reminds us in the conversation included in the book, several British films that found fertile ground in these areas. The book closes with the image of a shooting star: perhaps the poetry the author invites us to gather in each place we inhabit, so as not to lose its memory. — Steve Bisson