Jar of Teeth Photography Book by Tom Sussex

About the Book

Jar of Teeth is a documentary photobook made in Tower Hamlets, East London—a borough built through successive waves of migration, labour and survival. Here, Britain's imperial past and multicultural present exist side by side, shaping a landscape where questions of identity, belonging and citizenship are lived rather than debated.

Photographed over several years, the work is a personal examination of the people who have chosen, or been compelled, to make this island their home. These photographs are less concerned with explaining migration than with witnessing its consequences: the fragile architectures of community, the negotiations of everyday life, and the quiet dignity of those whose presence continues to redefine what Britain is.

Against a backdrop of increasingly hostile borders and political narratives that seek to divide, Jar of Teeth insists on the ordinary. It finds meaning in streets, markets, homes and places of worship—in moments where lives overlap and histories accumulate. The work asks what it means to belong to a nation shaped by movement, and whose story has always been written by those who arrived from elsewhere.

Published in a limited edition of 250 signed and numbered copies, Jar of Teeth is both a personal testimony and a documentary record. It is a portrait of a borough that stands as a microcosm of contemporary Britain, where the everyday becomes political and where community is forged not through sameness, but through the shared act of living together.