In Photos: Bristol’s The Island through the lens of local photographer Irene Haro

In a new collaboration with MPB, Crack Magazine has commissioned three emerging photographers to create original photo series documenting the communities and cultural spaces that matter most to them. The platform – a global marketplace for buying, selling, and trading used photo and video gear – provided each photographer with a £1,000 grant and access to equipment to support the creation of their work.

Irene Haro has built her practice around live music and the spaces that contain it. Here, the Spanish-born, Bristol-based photographer takes us inside underground music venue The Island.

Working primarily across club nights, festivals and artist portraiture, Irene Haro is interested in how music scenes reflect wider social conditions – how identities, pressures and collective energies surface through sound and gathering. Her series on Bristol’s legendary venue, The Island, commissioned by Crack Magazine in collaboration with MPB, brings that focus inward, turning toward a single venue and the people who sustain it.

Haro is attentive to atmosphere, but she resists excess. A blurred crowd is pressed down a narrow room, colour bleeding into shadow. Elsewhere, the aftermath: an empty bathroom, fluorescent light exposing scuffed floors and graffiti. These images don’t dramatise the night so much as sit with its residue, with flash and grain keeping the work grounded in physical conditions rather than aesthetic polish.

Interspersed are portraits of the people who make The Island function. Shot with care and directness, these images slow the tempo of the series.

Haro has noted the importance of showing “the people who make this possible,” and the work follows through on that intention without sentimentality. As a whole, the series treats The Island as infrastructure rather than icon. It’s a place shaped by use – rehearsals, nights, clean-ups, returns – and by a community invested in keeping it viable.

Take a look through Haro’s photographs below, and look back on this project’s previous photo stories from Mariana Pires and Jock Thomson.