It’s a long way from east London to Mexico. But not if you’re a member of the unquiet dead.
It’s not Hallowe’en, but Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), the festival where Mexicans remember their ancestors with a carnival atmosphere. Stories of the dead are told, altars are spread with the departed’s favourite food and drink, and revellers dress in extravagant costumes, often topped off with a skull mask or facepaint.
The Day of the Dead usually falls on 1 or 2 November; in recent years, the holiday has been celebrated by a massive fancy dress parade in Mexico City. This is a relatively new ritual for a holiday hundreds of years old. It was inspired by an opening scene in the James Bond film ‘Spectre’ in 2015, and by 2025 the parade was drawing 1.5 million people on to the streets.
The parade has, thanks to the instantaneous influence of the internet and social media, made it to London, too. A Mexican-style parade has been running in east London’s Hoxton since 2017, and has become even more popular since the end of the Covid pandemic. It’s a Hallowe’en-adjacent spectacle of fancy dress and ghoulish glamour, all arranged down Columbia Road, the site of London’s biggest weekend flower market.
Locals mix with members of the city’s Mexican community. There are costumes of impressive complexity, and a mariachi band rubbing shoulders with an old-fashioned East End horse-drawn hearse.
This year’s parade took place on Saturday – this was my third visit, and this was by far the busiest. The weather helped; it felt like London’s long, hot summer just didn’t want to end, and the sky was clear and cloudless blue.
I spent this Day of the Dead testing compact cameras intended for forthcoming Cameraburo pop-ups – I tend to make the most of a sunny Saturday at this time of the year. One camera that I had in the bag was a LOMO LC-A someone had contacted me about. I’d spent a lunch hour this week replacing the seals on it and loaded it with a roll of Kodak Gold 200. Saturated colour films works so well with the LC-A’s contrasty Minitar lens.
An event like the Day of the Dead can make even the most humble compact camera sing, but the roll taken on the LOMO seems to be the pick of the bunch. I’ve been shooting with this camera for more than 25 years and shooting with it is pure muscle memory.
Chatting to my friend George and his daughter Rebecca on the sidelines, I spotted this skeleton-masked attendee posing with some young Asian women – the leering skull mouth in stark contrast to their practised selfie poses as he positioned a smartphone for a pic.
I managed to dart into the road to frame it pleasingly, and had enough time to fire off a couple of frames un-noticed. By the time I’d returned to my friends, he was gone, melting back into the ghoulish crowd.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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