Photography and Culture, 2019. doi: 10.1080/17514517.2019.1654246 PDF here: Restricted Images Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia Continue reading
While not an exclusively collaborative project Kirsty Mackay is incorporating some measures of participation and shared representation into her new body of work (for which she was just awarded the Rebecca Vassie Memorial Award for developing photographers), The Fish That Never Swam. In this series Mackay is revisiting Glasgow, her… Continue reading
Photographer Wendy Ewald joins host Harry Kreisler in a discussion of her craft, shares her thoughts on working with children, and reflects on using a camera as an educational tool in Conversations with History In a 1998 video interview with Wendy Ewald, American historian Harry Kreisler acknowledges the complex… Continue reading
Between November 2016 and September 2017 Gary Bratchford and Robert Parkinson undertook an onsite residency in Halton, Liverpool, as part of the Open Eye Cultural Shifts project. During this 10-month period they worked with two distinct and pre-determined groups; The Women of Windmill Hill in Runcorn and the Widnes Vikings… Continue reading
In socially engaged photography and documentary practice, listening and participation can become both the medium and the form, the journey and the destination. This panel will explore relationships between listening and participation. Can listening set conditions for meaningful participation? Can participation produce new opportunities for listening? Is it possible for… Continue reading
“…thinking about photography in collaborative terms invites us to reconfigure assumptions about the photographic act in all its stages.” Dr Daniel Palmer is a writer and Associate Professor in the Art Theory Program in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at Monash University. His research and professional practice focuses… Continue reading
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
This is a snippet from an amazing conversation between Anthony Luvera and Stefanie Braun in Critical Cities Volume 2; Ideas, knowledge and agitation from emerging urbanist SB: The photographs in this project are taken by homeless or ex-homeless people. The creation of each ‘self-portrait’ is assisted by you, but… Continue reading
“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
When I started working as a photojournalist in my 20s, I thought it was important to tell people about events that were happening outside of their society. Now I see that my main contribution is connecting people. A simple story about what is happening elsewhere will not change any situation.… Continue reading
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
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
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
“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
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 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
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
Nigel Poor, Helena Acosta and Violette Blue were introduced by email on the 22nd of January 2015 for the Open Engagement blog project, produced by Gemma-Rose Turnbull, and asked to speak to their shared interests for this blog. What follows is excerpts from their emailed conversations. Nigel Poor: Professor of… Continue reading
“Sam Cotter’s pocket-sized publication “Reciprocity – a failure to communicate” investigates photographic reciprocity failure, a technical term in photography for the instances in which photographic materials stops behaving in a linear way. In these situations the medium has a kind of autonomy and requires more from a scene than is… Continue reading
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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
“There is no calculus to determine the most effective way to show horror. But certainly it would be important to investigate the processes that engender it, and not just the shocking results, no matter how visual. It would be also helpful to begin to try and trace alternatives to such… Continue reading
Quibriance Waters from The King School Portrait Project. “I think it’s one of those fundamental questions a lot of people talk about in terms of social practice. I don’t know that aesthetics are the end goal of a lot of art. When you take a look at an artist… Continue reading
Ginger Bob, 2007 from Titz, T. (2010). Right to be Counted. Retrieved from http://tobiastitz.de/projects/ The Australian referendum in May 1967, while legally minimalist, is considered a important point in the recognition of Indigenous Australians. The referendum, which was overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian public, approved two amendments to the Australian Constitution. These changes gave the Federal… Continue reading
I’ve just started reading Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship properly (having only ever browsed it in snatches and grabs before now). It is “the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art,” written by Claire Bishop, who is Professor in the PhD program in Art… Continue reading
Image from Red Light Dark Room; Sex, lives and stereotypes, 2011. “Despite the current enthusiasm for social practice, it is not without its tensions, especially in sectors where art and activism overlap. As agents of change, social-practice projects can seem wanting: the scale is often small, the works are temporary,… Continue reading
Rakma, Nasra, Asli and Zam Zam, Somali Community, Brisbane, Australia 2003 by Shannon Ghannam A former school mate and friend, Shannon Ghannam, is a London-based Australian photography and multimedia professional, who has most recently worked on award-winning Reuters multimedia and photography projects, including The Wider Image and Times of Crisis.… Continue reading