British fashion photographer, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, renowned for his work in numerous magazines including Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair, and for documenting the media frenzy surrounding the death of Princess Diana, is currently in Moscow for an exhibition of his

“The Firm” has re-emerged, six years after original publication, as an exhibition in Moscow's Pobeda gallery.

Ralph McTell must have seen the pictures in this exhibition when he wrote the renowned song. For this is a tour of London that tourists don't generally get to see.

“It was a magazine story and never was to do a book first-off. It was a magazine story photographing a night out with a couple of geezers, guys. One thing led to another,” the photographer underscores.

Over a four-year period Bain Hogg has catalogued different aspects of the underworld – from exile in Tenerife, to the broad underbelly of their activity in the UK.
 
From quiet close-ups of old-time gangster legends smoking in East End bars, to raunchy Mayfair party antics, to the ritual of high-profile funerals, this exhibition covers the gamut.

To any foreigner seeing these pictures, it will dispel forever the myth of a quaint old London Town where the worst rogue you might meet is Austin Powers. This is a powerful photographic study of England's top-ranking organised villainy.

Jocelyn Bain Hogg has captured the faces and places of London's gangster “Firm” in all their delicious ugliness. Like their American counterparts, British “gangsters” have always contained an element of the glamour and seduction about them.

The combination of secret-society, sharp dressing, and flouting both laws and morals has made them intriguing components of popular culture.

Bain Hogg says “The Firm” shows the everyday life of this world, of these faces to whom violence is common currency.

“I do not think there is anything. It is just my life. The bad ones got censored so we could not use them. It is pretty mild, I think. It is nice,” Bernie, one of Bain Hogg's potential prototypes

But not everyone sees it that way. To get another perspective Bain Hogg took one of the muse’s of his work to the opening in Moscow.

“I do not think there is anything. It is just my life. The bad ones got censored so we could not use them. It is pretty mild, I think. It is nice,” a heavily tattooed Bernie noted.

Regarding future projects, maybe Moscow might offer an interesting view through the lens for Bain.

“I need to find a good story here. I will be fascinated to spend my time here and get under the skin of it,” he said.

As for this exhibition, it is a bare-knuckled face of an underworld seldom seem by most, and for those of you wanting to check it out, it is open now and will be showing in Moscow's Pobeda Gallery until the end of October.