Nearly 30 years after photographing London’s criminal underworld, Jocelyn Bain Hogg’s landmark gangster series The Firm returns to Leica Gallery London.
Today’s films, pay-for-tv dramas and endless true-crime podcasts tap into public appetites for the British gangster. Almost 30 years ago, documentary photographer Jocelyn Bain-Hogg walked into their world with his Leica and a proposition. ‘I never ever lied to them. I made it clear I didn’t want to photograph their own presentation – no posed pictures and no complicity,’ he remembers.
The Firm photographic series made Bain Hogg’s reputation. The work was first published as a hardback book in 2001 and paperback in 2003. Glossy editorials across the globe delivered pages to readers who devoured the subject. This summer, the Leica Gallery in London is revisiting the work and delving into the iconic Kodak boxes where the prints have remained since the late 1990s. The hand-printed photographs complete with Bain Hogg’s annotations, stamps and working marks on the reverse make them darkroom artefacts as much as documentary photographs.
Chance encounter
For three years Bain Hogg stalked the criminal underworld from East End London pubs to Soho clubs to lavish parties, family gatherings bringing rarely seen moments to new audiences. The Firm has become one of the defining projects of its era, depicting a world where loyalty, status and violence were the fabric of everyday life.
Like many great historic assignments, it almost began by chance. While working on an editorial assignment for women’s lifestyle and fashion magazine Elle, Bain Hogg was asked to photograph a journalist interviewing two well-known London villains. He didn’t just take the portrait and leave. Bain Hogg did what he has always done, he stayed, chatted and listened. The conversation drifted towards his actor father Tom Bain Hogg and one gangster’s son who shared a theatrical connection. Whiskey inevitably followed in the room of a private club. Slowly trust developed.
The glimpse into a hidden world had captivated Bain Hogg and asked if he could keep photographing. A commission for Japanese GQ followed. What began as a month’s work became a three-year immersion that ultimately resulted in The Firm. It would have been easy for Bain Hogg to glamourise organised crime but the resulting photographs intelligently present a complicated social landscape of hard men, proud fathers, loyal friends and ageing faces carrying decades of experience. Bain Hogg paired his Leica with a ring flash that cut through the nights and cigar smoke to illuminate expensive jewellery, tattooed hands, bare breasts and backroom conversations. The intimacy suggests that trust was earned, Bain Hogg had become almost invisible.
Trust without compromise
When I interviewed Bain Hogg at the prestigious Visa Pour l’Image international festival of photojournalism in 2011, where we were exhibiting alongside each other, he laughed at the myths that had grown around the work. Was he a gangster? No. An expert on British organised crime? No. Constantly in danger? Not really. These myths weren’t helped by the way Baing Hogg dressed, as if he’d just walked out of Gieves & Hawkes of Saville Row. Stories continued to circulate that simply owning a copy of The Firm could settle unpaid debts, or that Bain Hogg somehow possessed influence within London’s criminal circles. The reality was perhaps a little simpler. ‘It was the demeanour of Bain Hogg,’ Foto8 director Jon Levy told me at the time. ‘He’s not trying to be someone he isn’t.’
Honesty was Bain Hogg’s currency. It mattered more than bravado. He showed the photographs that he was making to those he was making them of, nothing was staged, no attempt was made to flatter – he just let the images naturally unfold. It was straightforward, which is the foundation on which the project rested and developed.
The vintage prints on display at Leica were crafted on film and printed in the darkroom. They belong to a time pre smartphones, social media and omnipresent surveillance that now saturate our lives. The decision by Leica to exhibit the original exhibition prints over contemporary reproductions, reinforces that sense of authenticity and particular moment in photographic history. Each print represents both the moment it records and the craft involved in producing photographs before digital workflows transformed documentary practice.
Print matters
In 2011 Bain Hogg would later go on to publish The Family (not a follow-up to The Firm), a portrayal of the British criminal underworld, centred around the South London based Pyle family. Other acclaimed books include cataloguing the world of stars and the people who idolise them in Idols + Believers (2006) and a look at eccentricities, celebrations and social gatherings in A British Entertainment (2012). The Firm remains the body of work most closely associated with his name. The enduring appeal lies less in the notorious subjects than Bain Hogg’s observational restraint, confirming him as one of Britain’s finest documentary photographers.
The photographs don’t force the viewer to admire or condemn, they simply offer rare access to a closed society. The stories are revealed through gesture, expression and atmosphere. Nearly 30 years on from the invitation for “a night out with a couple of geezers,” what The Firm reminds us is that the strongest documentary photography often begins not with judgement, but with curiosity.
Exhibition
Leica Gallery London presents an exhibition of vintage prints from The Firm, by celebrated documentary photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg, from the 11th of July until the 3rd of September 2026
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