Anni Kay’s photographs, made under the name Hulme Loonies, offer a first-hand account of life in Hulme and across Manchester as it is lived from within. Working on film and photographing with real familiarity, she turns her attention to friends, flats, parties, streets and the everyday social world that continues to shape the area. The work has an ease and directness to it. Nothing feels forced. What comes through instead is trust, instinct and the kind of closeness that only comes from knowing a place properly.

BCA holds a substantial record of Hulme from the 1960s onwards, tracing the area through demolition, reinvention and decades of social change. Hulme has never been easy to flatten into one story. It has carried hardship, independence, creativity and defiance in equal measure, and has long produced its own culture on its own terms. Within the archive, photographers including Adam T Burton and David Chadwick have documented different chapters of that history. Anni Kay’s photographs belong to that wider record, not as a retrospective view, but as a living account of Hulme in the present.

Kay’s connection to the area runs deeper than her own camera. Her parents lived through the Crescent era, and that family history gives the work an added sense of continuity and attachment. These are not passing observations or stylised scenes. They are photographs grounded in shared experience, familiarity and a real bond with place. In Kay’s hands, Hulme is neither romanticised nor reduced to cliché. It appears as it is: close-knit, rough round the edges, funny, unpredictable and full of life. Taken together, the Hulme Loonies photographs form an important record of 21st-century Hulme and of the people who continue to give the area its character.