Crossing Sectors 2025: Embedding Collaboration and Care

Crossing Sectors is a development training programme for creative practitioners to explore the multiple ways culture can be co-authored with others. The programme questions where contemporary art and photographic practice can exist in society today. 

As the title suggests the programme is based on our understanding that whilst photographers and photography organisations might be well placed to bring our expertise in image making to a project, we are not necessarily the experts of the people and places we are invited in to work with. The programme therefore mirrors the gallery’s wider way of working, actively collaborating with and bringing creatives together with experts outside of the art sector, to better inform our role within the areas of health, social care, justice, migration and climate change. 

Each year we have been responsive to the needs and interests of our previous year’s cohort and this has led to inviting a diverse range of guest speakers including the NHS and social care charities, initiatives such as Photography Ethics Centre and The Arts and Health Hub, the Royal Horticultural Society and Novus, a prison education organisation. 

This Land of Mine is Andreea Chitan’s exploration of place as inheritance and longing. Navigating the English landscape as an immigrant, she reworks the family album to carry fragments of home. Her images hold space for memory, dislocation, and the slow forging of belonging in a place not yet hers – but perhaps, through presence and persistence, could become so.

2025 marks our 5th anniversary of delivering Crossing Sectors, and for this year’s course we wanted to recognise that the programme can benefit not only photographers and lens-based artists, but also those who wish to commission this type of work. Therefore this year’s programme also invited participants who work in learning and engagement, programming and curatorial positions, and also many people who see themselves as multi-role practitioners – sometimes working across both the artist and creative producer roles simultaneously. 

Some highlights in the programme for the participants this year included the one-on-one mentoring we offer between an Open Eye Gallery staff or board member and / or  a previous Crossing Sectors participant, as well as workshops focusing on diversity and inclusion with Ayo Barely, Trauma Informed Practice with Bread and Roses counseling, and a session focused on how embedding self-care in your practice can better support yourself and others in participatory settings, with Daniel Regan. 

Bodies of Water was born out of the frustration with the lack of visual representation and the perpetuation of societal stigmas surrounding people living in larger bodies, resulting in insidious messaging that those people are unhealthy and don’t like to keep active. This ongoing collaborative project aims to challenge these harmful narratives by photographing and interviewing fat and plus-sized swimmers and celebrating the joy that being in the open water brings them.

Photographer and producer Elaine Smithies, from this year’s programme, said, 

“It would not be overstating things to say this programme has been life-changing for me. To be able to talk about my practice seriously on a regular basis, to learn so much, to be surrounded regularly by other artists, to have the opportunity to have my photographs exhibited in the Digital Window Gallery – it has made me think about my career, my practice and myself in a whole different way. 

The mentor sessions with Sophie Mahon (Open Eye Gallery’s Joint Head of social practice) have been so incredible – allowing me to explore who I am and the projects I’m working on. 

Crossing Sectors also came at a time in my life where I was starting to feel a bit invisible, and I now feel like I have a new purpose, able to use all my skills and experience that I’ve learnt over the years” 

Living by the coast enables physical and artistic space to breathe. Using smartphone photography to capture the beauty in the everyday, these photographs explore themes of symmetry, stillness and negative space. 

I think this also highlights one of the other unique aspects of the Crossing Sectors programme. We don’t ask for practitioners to be at a certain point in their career to apply. Whether they are recent graduates, self-taught or have 20 years of experience, we care more about why you want to take part and what you feel is important about embedding a more social, ethical and  collaborative approach to your work. 

And care, more broadly, has become a recurring theme throughout this year’s programme. From aspects of considering the reasons why we choose to work in a more ethical and collaborative way with others to the content of this year’s programme which asked participants to consider care from a perspective of looking after themselves, acknowledging others’ lived experiences and considering how to apply caring techniques through trauma informed work. 

It is a group of artists from Türkiye. It works based on photography but also practices the reflection of the image in different mediums with artistic production. It consists of women who carry out their work individually and examine their current common focuses and intersections through online meetings. This selection includes works where the body and contact relations are highlighted and various readings. Images by Eda Emirdağ, Rehan Miskci and Tuna Pektaş Archive.

As facilitator of the programme, I also witnessed care through the powerful peer support and generosity of time each participant gave to each other throughout the 10 week course. 

Often in socially engaged projects, whilst it might seem that the project exists in a 2-hour workshop slot where photographers and community groups come together, the reality is that those conversations and social experiences stay with both the photographers and participants for much longer. It has been important for us as a group this year to acknowledge and discuss the emotional labour and often hidden care and consideration that exists in these types of projects. 

Creative Producer and one of this year’s participants Sorcha Boyle highlighted the need to have the time to digest this way of working, when she fed back, ‘It was great have space to reflect, learn and meet other people working in similar fields.”

Dear Moon is a book that brings together letters and moon photographs collected over six years. People from diverse cultures and walks of life share intimate reflections addressed to the Moon. This poetic and visual journey forms part of an archive Karema is creating to explore human connection through words and images.

Moreover, with both the artists and creative producers / curators being on the same programme this year, I hope more common ground and shared understanding could be found between those who commission these types of projects and those who are invited to undertake them. 

It is not only the combined voices of different types of professionals who make up this programme. Crossing Sectors also ensures the voices of the communities we work with are also central to the shape and focus of what we deliver on each year’s course. An example of this was our first week’s session which was co-run by community photography collective and Open Eye Gallery’s long term collaborators Clickmoor. One of our programme participants, Ulysses Alvarez , reflected on the importance of hearing directly from the communities we wish to collaborate with: 

“I just wanted to share how useful I have found this session from the reciprocal nature and relationship the gallery has with the Clickmoor group. The fact that Clickmoor were here today as the facilitators guiding the ‘professional’ artists and producers, felt key for me. They are the experts here today, not us, as it should be, and that felt really important”. 

A New Normal. If you could re-envision a status quo, a given standard, a safe space, what would it be?  Created in 2020 during the pandemic, A New Normal is a collaborative photographic series featuring handwritten letters. Recognising physical distance, the project invited responses across different borders, asking those to personally redefine their hopes for a new normality. Featured words by Hannah Nishat-Botero. 

Everyday Motion. Within our fractured movement, a collective choreography exists Everyday Motion is a photographic series featuring prose and choreography. Through abstracted performance, the project explores the impact of our individual movement and how this shapes our collective spaces.

Pei Yee Tong. Photographic documentation of performance artist Pei Yee Tong.

I for one am incredibly grateful for all the contributions from our Cross sector partners, communities and our participants both this year and from our 5 year programme to date. When we come together to share issues which really matter to us and support each other to think creatively about our responses to those issues, we bring a collective strength and a future built on resilience and hope.

Cost of living is at an all time high and the overall number of people reporting mental health issues has risen in recent years, Michelle Webster explored how people are living and if they are living at all. What are people’s reasons for changing or not changing their life, do financial constraints or moral values play a part? Do the pressures of society contribute to the mental health crisis?

In  Don’t mention the war Susanne examines the shadows the Third Reich still casts on her native country Germany, its people and her own life. WYWH looks at the psychological impact of the residue from national socialist education and upbringing, and unprocessed (trans-generational) trauma in her own family through the generations.

Text by Liz Wewiora.

Works by the Crossing Sectors 2025 participants are available on Open Eye Gallery’s Digital Window until 14 September.