Reflecting on the potentials and the tensions of photography as a collaborative practice…

As we reflect back on the first 6 months of the Culture Shifts programme, we say a fond farewell to a 2016 full of new relationships, friendships, networks and contemplation between the ever-shifting role of photography and society.

Some of our Culture Shifts photographers have been working with specific individuals and community groups across Merseyside, embedding themselves within the community setting whilst others have only just started to meet new faces and hear new stories.

What has become clear from the projects, which have developed over the past few months, is a genuine interest from both the community and photographer to want to continue their conversations. Often with residencies with restricted timelines you can feel like you are only just scratching the surface of a narrative, and with each encounter and conversation you unearth hidden connections to more people and places, and new subject matters and areas of interests which both the photographer and community alike want to delve deeper into.

Photographer Tony Mallon, for example has met with the Northwood’s Golden age women’s group for over a number of weeks now. Some of the women are particularly keen to develop a skills exchange between themselves and the photographer; Tony offering the photography skills, the women offering a huge and personal insight into the history of their area. Some of the women are more focused on exploring self-representation, and Mallon himself has reflected on how first impressions can always be misleading. What seems to have struck him most is the perception of an older women’s community as a group of women who are more fragile or vulnerable, but Mallon has been completely struck by the vitality and active community lifestyle these women hold dear to Northwoods. He hopes to explore these ideas further through collaborative portraiture over the next few months. The residency has also allowed Mallon to reflect on his own relationship to the area, with Northwoods being his local hometown until he turned 18. The women are a reminder of what was but also a welcome new perspective of a place he once called home.

Mallon is not the only photographer to re-trace connections to the community he is collaborating with. Both photographer and filmmaker Andrew Jackson and Darryl Georgiou (and supported by film maker Rebekah Tolley), have been meeting the individual residents and shop keepers of the Granby area, Toxteth. With a recent media spotlight shining on the Granby 4Streets CLT, post hosting a Turner Prize winning project with art collective Assemble, the photographers have been revisiting the individuals who actually make up the fabric of the area, each with their own stories, histories and perspectives from communities both “lost and forgotten” and the “here and now”. Upon this dialogue and interaction with local residents, both Jackson and Georgiou both living in Birmingham, have found personal friend and family connections to the area, almost as if this has been a hidden calling card home.

These relationships and discovered narratives about people and place have created a rich tapestry of new photographic work, but with these new connections and stories, comes its own challenges. Photographers invited to work in a new community context can often feel in a limbo position between commissioner and community, with multiple agendas pulling the photographers eye and priorities from one side to the next.

There can be a pressure of high expectations from both ends for the photographer to deliver something “authentic” about the collaborative experience but the very nature of asking an outsider to engage with a new community can create its own inherent artificial feelings. But hasn’t that always been the role of a photographer in many ways, to be that guest, that outside visitor to a new setting, reflecting back through the lens of what he/she seems before them and sharing with others? Whilst this can suggest a somewhat single perspective view, the beauty of the Culture Shifts programme is that the photographers are invited to collaborate with the community directly on what is being reflected and how, inviting a series of subjective responses from different individuals and creating a bigger picture of what their community really means to them.

This still doesn’t mean high expectations aren’t still placed on the photographer as in some instances what the community or individuals want to explore through their photo stories are massive subjects in their own right. Colin McPherson, for example, has been invited to work with a group of young people living in Sefton, interested in reflecting what really matters to the younger generation in that area. The young people want to explore some major topics such as breaking down stigma’s attached to labeling, body image and gender identity as well as raising issues around mental health, sexual health and curriculum for life. Each one of these topics could be explored for a lifetime, but together with the young people of Sefton, McPherson has the challenging but exciting role of summarising these topics into a concise series of impactful photographs.

The photographers of the Culture Shifts programme reflect some wider topics currently in debate across the photography and socially engaged network of practitioners in the UK. After visiting a recent lecture by photographer Anthony Luvera, around photography as a collaborative practice, some similar themes seem to be resonating around this type of photographic work. What do we really mean by co-authored images? Does work need to be co-created to be co-authored, who needs to physically be making the photograph to suggest the process has been collaborative, and what are the tension lines between process V’s product? As Luvera suggested “there is always a tension around the potential powers and problems of representation” even more so with photography, a medium which often associates itself with the individual on-looker’s lens. However, photography by its very nature was created as a means of representation, reflecting something more democratic, a reproduction of what we see before us. A theorist and writer, Jacques Rancière describes photography as a ‘reflection on the true’. He talks about photography’s role to shift the focus of what we represent from only the “great names and events of history to the life of the (often) anonymous… it finds society, or a civilisations… in capturing the minute details of ordinary life”. In an era of social media and mass participation, photography now more than ever, takes on this mass democratic role of self-representation. So just think what can happen when photographers and communities come together to expand and create images of their own lives.

What seems clear from the Culture Shifts programme to date, is that there is no one set answer in terms of approach to co-creation at least, and that the nature of the collaboration has to come down to the context with its community and setting. In the case of Tadhg Devlin’s recent collaboration with individuals from the SURF Dementia Network group, it became very clear that these individuals wanted to share their personal stories, and how they live with a specific condition not just the condition itself. In order for this to be realised, it was crucial the individuals shared their own story by becoming the subject matter of their own visual narrative – with Tadhg using his photographic skills to animate these individual stories shared between photographer and the SURF group over a number of months. In this sense, a true collaboration emerged between photographer and individual, co-designing, performing and capturing a series of photo stories. A unique series of photographs have been created, and ones which represent individual stories which never would have been realised in such a powerful way if not for the pairing of photographer and group.

Whether the Culture Shifts projects have just started, or nearing their completion, they all feel like they have just hit the tip of the iceberg of a bigger on-going conversation between photographer and community. It is not only community groups and individuals from projects so far who have suggested wanting to explore ideas and images further, but a desire from the photographers involved, to find out more more about themselves as practitioners through these collaborative roles.

We a wait with great anticipation and excitement, to see what type of collaborative approaches will emerge from our Culture Shifts partnerships and which new stories will be shared in 2017.

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Written by Liz Wewiora
Culture Shifts Creative Producer