Culture Shifts

Culture Shifts is a new socially engaged photography programme led by Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK and supported by a strategic touring fund from Arts Council England. Working across a host of social housing, local authority culture and health partners and communities across the Liverpool and Merseyside city regions, we… Continue reading

PH15: the Argentine youth photography project

17 years of photography workshops in the same community: A conversation with Moira Rubio Brennan and Miriam Priotti, directors of PH15.     As participatory, collaborative and community-based photography projects proliferate, initiatives that stand the test of time stick out from the crowd.  This is not to say that projects… Continue reading

Landmark Collaborative Work by New Mexico Prisoners and Photographer in the Early Eighties

This article is reposted from Pete Brook’s website Prison Photography     I’ve heard from a couple of folk that when I started Prison Photography, they laughed at its folly. Not only had a bleeding-heart liberal thug-hugger come along to explain a world no-one cared about to no-one in particular, but… Continue reading

Some Time Between Us

Some Time Between Us is a project initiated by Emily Fitzgerald and the Hollywood Senior Center to bring together a group of 22 middle school students from Beaumont Middle School and older adults from the Hollywood Senior Center. Fitzgerald and the Hollywood Senior Center group previously worked on the project Being… Continue reading

Another Kind of Girl

  “No cheesy music to manipulate emotions. No images replicated a million times. Just a young curious mind producing some of the most powerful documentation of the Syrian refugee experience I’ve seen.” – Mark Strandquist   This simple, powerful film was made by Khaldiya,  a participant of the Another Kind of Girl… Continue reading

Women Of York: Shared Dining

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 This book ‘Women Of York: Shared Dining’ was made by Susan Meiselas (@s_meiselas1963) with women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution for Women. It’s a contemporary response to Judy Chicago’s famous feminist work ‘Dinner Party’ (which is permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum). My first impressions were “This book is ugly with chintzy design, fonts in all different colours.” It was put together by the industry great Yolanda Cuomo Design, so what gives? Here’s what. Susan handed over total and collective decision-making to the women. The shape, the images, the text, the layout, the fonts, the sequencing and much more. Susan got out of the way entirely. This is their book. Susan, with others, just helped it along. It’s an amazing socially-engaged project. And I need to stop being such a snob.

New Ways of Photographing the New Masai

 This essay by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa looks at how some recent photobooks, featuring African subjects, rehash pejorative tropes. This article first appeared in Issue 17 of the Aperture Photography App. This extract is taken from the Aperture blog. Dutch photographer Jan Hoek’s New Ways of Photographing the New Masai (Art Paper Editions, 2014) has the appearance… Continue reading

Sara Terry & Mariam X

I met Mariam (not her real name), an ex-child soldier, in Sierra Leone in June 2007, early in my work on “Forgiveness and Conflict.” Because Mariam’s privacy needed to be protected for legal reasons, I needed to find a way to tell her story without showing her face. She had… Continue reading

Sharing the Viewfinder

The Maidan videos were intended to be Instagram vignettes of my experiences as a photographer, an intimate look at how I see the world. They show how I saw the men of Maidan: 6cm x 6cm, through the camera’s frosted ground glass, their reflections reversed by the mirror, moving and… Continue reading

The Dad Project

“We’re not a photo family. None of us like having our pictures taken. This was pretty weird way to try changing that.” – Briony Campbell   Briony Campbell’s collaborative work with her dying father David, The Dad Project (2009), is great. I am excited about the way they made it together, and also the… Continue reading

Being Old

This gorgeous project was made by my collaborator and friend Emily Fitzgerald (we made The King School Portrait Project together). Being Old is a photo-based collaboration between Emily and a group of people from the Hollywood Senior Center in Portland, Oregon. Emily visualised that the weekly workshops she ran would be dedicated to “creating… Continue reading

Dru Donovan’s Positions Taken

  Dru Donovan’s interactive restagings of real situations are palpably challenging and painfully relevant, offering a cinematic entrance into human struggle. Using smart visual language, her photographs captivate our attention through imaginations of the all too real. – Jim Goldberg   Earlier this year Dru Donovan collaborated with a group… Continue reading

Participatory Playbook: an Exhibition at LOOK3

This is reposted from the Magnum Foundation tumblr. –––––– We’re excited to share the opening of Tactics of Collaboration: A Participatory Playbook, an exhibition of an ongoing collaboration with Photography, Expanded Fellow Mark Strandquist at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, Virginia. This exhibition was held in conjunction with the 2015 LOOK3 Festival of the… Continue reading

Participatory project in New York City Public Housing

  While I think there are more sophisticated and visually impactful ways to co-author documentary projects than the participatory model, this project was released in book form by powerHouse books earlier in the year, and it is definitely worth having a look at (again, the caveat that I think straight… Continue reading

Tapping the Creative Energies of New York City’s Migrants with Street and Studio Photography

Reposted from Prison Photography April 27, 2015   GIVING POWER TO THE PEOPLE Sol Aramendi is an absolute force. Community smarts, a big heart and bloody hardwork makes her THE instigator for photography and inquiry among the immigrants living in New York city. Project Luz, an organization she founded, delivers photography workshops. Most… Continue reading

Disposable Camera Project

This gallery contains 3 photos.

  A few weeks ago an my friend Amie Batalibasi, who is the founder and director of Melbourne-based Colour Box Studio (CBS), a pop up art space and online creative hub, contacted me to write the forward for an upcoming book they are self publishing. The book, curated by Kristina Arnott,… Continue reading

ASSEMBLY – Anthony Luvera

First Base Day Centre from Assembly by Anthony Luvera, 2013-2014   ASSEMBLY is an exhibition of work created over a twelve-month period by Anthony Luvera with people who have experienced homelessness living in Brighton.   As part of Assembly, Luvera invited individuals associated with First Base Day Centre and Phase One Project to use… Continue reading

Participatory Book Design

    “You were not supposed to see these images. No one was,” says Christoph Bangert in the intro to his new book ‘WAR PORN’ which is basically a catalogue of battered, bloodied, mutilated and/or dismembered corpses from conflict zones around the world that Bangert has photographed during his career.… Continue reading

“Picturing Us…” Sonia Louise Davis, Community Photography, and the Experienced Moment

This gallery contains 8 photos.

“The problem with people being denied the very basic control over their own images is that they lose control over their stories, their histories…collaborative portraiture is all about a gesture…The fact that you have to be slow, that it’s physical, that it’s in the street… the process is the gesture.”… Continue reading

Anthony Luvera

Assisted Self-Portrait of Joe Murray, Joe Murray / Anthony Luvera Anthony Luvera is a London-based Australian photographer whose work I have been admiring and analysing about for a while now. I got his book Residency (2006-2011) in the mail last year, and the publication from the large-scale photography project which features assisted… Continue reading

Jason Lazarus in conversation with Mark Menjivar

Mark Menjivar: Hey Jason. Thanks so much for agreeing to answer some questions. I have been following your work for some time now and we have had some email exchanges over the years, but we have never had any in-depth conversations. I have always been drawn to the way you… Continue reading

Hello Neighbor

Julie Keefe’s Hello, Neighbor project. What happens to neighborhoods when your neighbors aren’t your neighbors any more? When interviewed about his rapidly changing North Portland community, my neighbor, Charles, said he didn’t mind the streets being safer, the businesses returning, or the houses being fixed up. What he did mind… Continue reading

The Archive of Unmade Photographs

  The Archive of Unmade Photographs* is an ongoing project where participants respond to the prompt; “What moment from your life do you most wish you had a photograph of?” To participate, individuals create a postcard ‘from’ their chosen memory; describing it’s importance, and why no photograph exists. For the 2014… Continue reading