Jack Is Alive - Luke Overin

In Jack Is Alive, Luke Overin turns towards one of Britain’s stranger surviving customs, the Jack in the Green procession, a May Day ritual of greenery, noise, disguise, drinking, dancing, and public disorder.

A new book by Luke Overin, chronicler of Britain’s hidden subcultures, occasional hermit and devoted observer of the country’s stranger customs, Jack Is Alive follows the revived Jack in the Green tradition as it moves through Deptford, Greenwich and the City of London. Across pubs, streets, churchyards and crowded pavements, Overin photographs a world of leaf-covered figures, painted faces, Morris dancers, musicians, ceremonial costumes, old songs, raised glasses and bodies moving together through the city.

The work looks at folklore not as something fixed, polished or safely historical, but as a living and unstable form. A ritual remade each year through repetition, humour, belief and local feeling. What appears absurd is also deeply serious. What feels theatrical is also communal. In Overin’s photographs, the procession becomes a brief rupture in ordinary life, where class, custom, performance and English eccentricity gather beneath a moving canopy of green.

Jack Is Alive is a book about folklore, revival, ritual, and the strange persistence of collective belief. It is a portrait of a custom that refuses to die, and of the people who keep it moving, laughing, drinking and alive.