Connecting Past, Present, and Future: How Historical Photography Reshapes How We See Ourselves

This month, Tadhg Devlin is joined by artist and educator Jo Gane, whose socially engaged practice transforms historical archives and early photographic techniques into interactive community workshops. They dive into a socially engaged project created for Our Freedom: Then and Now – a nationwide initiative sparked by the 80th anniversary of VE/VJ Day that encourages communities to redefine modern freedom.

TD: WWII is often remembered through mid-century documentary film and newsprint. By reaching back to even earlier, tactile photographic methods – such as wet plate collodion, cyanotype, or photogravure – how do you hope to alter or deepen the viewer’s relationship to historical memory?

JG: I’ve discovered that using antique processes really helps people to see themselves beyond the time they live in. When I was working with my large-scale Victorian studio camera on the street in Nuneaton, the age of the camera itself drew people in to tell me about their family histories and memories of places.

Whilst the camera dating from 1894 and wet plate process from 1851 is older than WW2, it looks and smells obviously historical, at a distance. This sparks curiosity and a willingness to be photographed. Our relationships to historical memory are often imaginative and the act of being photographed with a historical process helps to activate the imagination in a sensory, tactile way.

TD: Your recent body of work marks the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII by using early, alternative photographic processes. What draws you to historical chemistry to explore a concept like “freedom,” and how does the physical weight of these techniques inform the thematic depth of the project?

JG: These processes are my practice and have been for all my work over the past twenty years so this is how I make photographs, it goes beyond the concept of the project. There is very little freedom in the chemistry, or the process which has quite limiting technical requirements, a darkroom and bright daylight being two of these! However, despite the physical weight of the equipment that is a challenge to transport and set up, there is a freedom in working in an entirely analogue way. 

Making a photograph from scratch with a person is a surprisingly immediate process. With wet plate the photograph is developed in around 15 seconds, so is visible within a few minutes of being taken. All this happens with and in front of the person in the image. The freedom exists in the image as a co-created object that is not tied to digital technologies and algorithms for its circulation. In that way it is a straight-forward thing, and I think that makes people less suspicious of its motives and more open to being photographed.

The physical weight and craft skill of making resonates with people, they carry a perceived value that translates to the image as a permanent object. This feels appropriate to the themes of the project as an important marker of a historic time. It was a real privilege to meet and photograph people throughout this project and giving them an image as a physical object felt fitting and was appreciated.

TD: Early photographic methods can be notoriously complex, precise, and unpredictable. How do you bridge the gap between rigorous technical craft and an accessible, hands-on workshop experience for members of the public who may have no prior photography background?

JG: The precision of the process is useful as it sets boundaries and expectations about what photography can do. It isn’t unpredictable once you’ve mastered the process, but the process dictates a slower rhythm of working which is actually quite a relaxing thing to make with, it gives you time to talk and think. Setting up the darkroom next to the camera and studio keeps the whole process together and allows me to explain the process workflow as we make the photographs, inviting the person into the process. In engaging in the making, people often then are curious to see themselves through the process and then are less self-conscious than with more contemporary methods of photography. Very little of the process has to happen in the darkroom – only 15 seconds of development, so people can watch and be part of most of the making in an accessible way. 

TD: Alternative processes inherently invite chemical artifacts, exposure shifts, and “happy accidents.” How do you guide workshop participants to view these unpredictable outcomes not as errors, but as meaningful elements of visual storytelling?

JG: The process artifacts are part of the making. Alternative processes operate as a collaboration between materials, people and the environments the photographs are made in. The artifacts tell a story of the making process and the non-human interaction that this involves which is the chemical intelligence of the materials. They offer an alternative reading of the circumstances the images were made in.

There is often movement with each exposure lasting up to 10 seconds. This makes it impossible to pose and as such people often have a kind of sculptural intensity in the way they sit and move.

TD: In your workshops, are the participants involved to assist with: mix, coat, expose, and wash their own prints. How does the physical, slow-paced labour of making a photograph transform a person’s emotional or intellectual connection to the theme of freedom?

JG: This depends on the process. With less toxic processes like Cyanotype that I worked with at the school, participants are involved in every stage of the process. This allowed them a way into the tactile nature of early photography.

With wet plate, I don’t mix all the chemicals due to their toxicity.  I buy the collodion pre-prepared. However, participants see and discuss the coating, exposure and wash. The best part of this is the slow reveal of the image out of clouds in the fixer, people see the image revealing itself as the tones invert and unexposed silver dissolves into the hypo.

The main collaborative element of the process is during the exposure that can be up to 15 seconds long outdoors in daylight. This is a point where the participant has to fully commit to making the image. It is a mediative, still moment of communication between the person and the materials. My cameras don’t have a shutter, I remove the lens cap and count. This makes this a human, not mechanical part of the process.

TD: Socially engaged art thrives on meeting people where they are. How do different environments – whether community centres, public parks, or heritage sites – reshape the dynamic of the darkroom and the conversations that happen within it?

JG:  The darkroom is an adaptable thing,  just a small and portable wooden chest or black hydroponics tent. Sometimes it’s the boot of my car. It easily converts to places where people are, community centres, public parks, or heritage sites. It draws people in out of curiosity – they want to know what I’m doing in the box. I often feel like a magician, pulling rabbits out of a hat as these processes become a performance with people in a place and I look like the rear end of a pantomime horse, so it’s fun and engaging. I’ve been asked if I had ferrets in my darkroom once, when working on the street with a wooden camera / darkroom.

TD: What becomes of the prints and objects created with the public during these workshops? How do these participant-made pieces converse with or expand upon your own primary body of work?

JG:  The people in the images get to keep them once they are scanned. This is crucial, the photographic objects don’t belong to me, they are their objects, that they made with my help. I hope that they go into family archives, albums and the process disrupts the linear function of time through the progression of photographic technology that exists in these family archives.

My own primary body of work is landscape-based, that’s when I meet and communicate with these processes, materials and place alongside my own history. The portraits aren’t mine, they’ll always belong to the person in the image and it’s important that they hold all the power.

TD: When a participant steps away from one of your sessions, what do you hope stays with them – both about the heritage of early photography and their own creative agency?

JG: The photograph as a precious object stays with them. I hope that it allows them to see themselves differently, out of time and as connected to a longer, bigger lineage of time and place. Often people tell me they look like their ancestors and perhaps they get a glimpse of how their great-grandchildren might see them in the future.

Our Freedom: Then and Now is a nationwide creative programme that invited communities across the UK to reflect on what freedom means 80 years after the end of the Second World War.

Delivered by Future Arts Centres in partnership with Libraries Connected and Open Eye Gallery, and supported using public funding by the UK Government through Arts Council England, the programme brought together 40 arts centres and 20 libraries across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

More than 10,000 people took part directly in projects across the UK, helping to create exhibitions, performances, installations, publications, workshops and events. More than one million people engaged with the programme during 2025 and 2026, including audiences for 228 public-facing events and exhibitions and the national touring photography exhibition.