One of the best-known ‘protest’ photographers is staging a six-month public exhibition in Shoreditch about the East End’s changing social scene — a story of protest and tragedy.

David Hoffman began documenting life on the streets in the 1970s when he moved into a squat in Whitechapel and started his decades-long quest to document homelessness, squalid conditions and political demos.

His eclectic images from the 1970s and 80s are on show from next month at the Museum of the Home in Hoxton.

“It didn’t take long to discover that documenting overt control of the State over our lives was what motivated me,” he says.

“My work sheds what some might see as an unforgiving light across racial and social conflict, policing, drugs, poverty and social exclusion.”

He admits to gaining a reputation as “the riot photographer’s riot photographer” at one point, with his determination “to look uncomfortable realities in the eye”.

David, who was raised in Stamford Hill before his family moved to Stanmore, says on his gallery website: “Some find the pictures uncomfortable but my intention is to document dispassionately and let the images stand as social challenge, to recognise the world as others live it.”

His exhibition coincides with publication of his monograph by Spitalfields Life Books, run by the Gentle Author, about social changes in the 1970s and 80s.

Hoffman went to live in a squat in Whitechapel’s Fieldgate Mansions in 1973 which changed his life, the Gentle Author notes.

He documented homelessness with intimate images, often visiting a shelter in the crypt of St Botolph’s church in Aldgate.

One of the tragic stories that emerged was Azella, a regular at the shelter who sometimes slept in a cardboard box in the car park of Denning Point tower block in nearby Commercial Street. A truck drove over the box one night in 1977 and killed her.

The Museum of the Home’s Danielle Patten said: “David Hoffman’s work is a story of resilience and solidarity. This exhibition highlights his contribution to photography about social justice.”

The museum in Kingsland Road, opposite Hoxton Overground station, crowdfunded a summer campaign for an exhibition in collaboration with Spitalfields Life that raised £10,000.

It is staged from October 15 for six months until March next year, with a programme of events about homelessness, racism and protest.