This month our Assistant producer for the socially engaged photography programme, Tricia Grant-Hanlon, speaks to current Picturing Eccles photographer-in-residence Paula Keenan about her current collaboration with this local Salford community.
Tricia: Paula, please tell us about the Picturing Eccles project!
Paula: I’m Paula Kennan. I’m the photographer leading the Picturing Eccles project. The project has come about because Eccles is undergoing change in its town centre area, where quite a lot of the development is being knocked down. And they’re starting again.
They’re looking at how the image of Eccles is perceived and how to move forward. It’s really about giving people in the community an opportunity to get involved in consultation, but in a more creative way. And so, by reaching out as far as we can in Eccles, we’re asking people if they have a particular love of Eccles, if they’ve got an opinion, and if they want to send photographs that reflect that.
Tricia: Did involvement of the community come initially from the council? Is that something they wanted?
Paula: Yeah. I mean, traditionally, people would have a meeting, they book a town hall, and people who wanted to or could, would turn up and have their say, but I think by doing a socially engaged project, we’re meeting people who might not necessarily get involved in that type of consultation but who’ll share a photograph.
Tricia: So it’s more accessible to more people in the community, that’s brilliant!
Сan you tell me a bit about your background and your own practice and how you became involved in socially engaged photography?
Paula: I probably consider myself being from a working-class background. You know, my dad was a coal miner, my mum was a housewife. I got brought up in a village where we didn’t have a local gallery space or anything, but when I had my second child, somebody took a black-and-white photograph of my son and I loved it. And they said, ‘Oh, you can do it at the unemployed workers centre.’ So I joined up and got the bug. At first, I wasn’t working as I was a full-time mum and I just started taking photographs around Wigan and then printing them, and I just loved it. From the minute I started taking pictures and watching that image come up in the dark room.
Tricia: You just fell in love.
Paula: Yeah. And you know, it’s really interesting because the first socially engaged images (or maybe it was more social documentary photography then) I saw were at Open Eye Gallery when it was still in the Whitechapel area of Liverpool. I think it probably was 1986/87. And even now I think about some of the images, documentary shots of a local housing estate, etc.
Then later on I started taking pictures, but I think I always leant towards taking pictures of people. So I did a HND, I went through an ordinary national diploma and I did a HND specifically in documentary photography. The photographers that I loved were Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt and Grace Robertson.
I also liked looking at the American photographers from around that time – Dust Bowl photographers from the Farm Security Administration. That’s where you’ve got the famous Dorothea Lange Mother and Child image, and there was just something about that, something in the expressions of people whose images were left in the hands of someone portraying the plight.
When I was at Stockport college, people would come to my house and we would sit there on Sunday morning, just flicking through the books and talking about photography, and it never really left me. And so being a photographer and a mother, if I couldn’t go out and take the pictures, I would just practise on the kids at home, have them posing, and so things like the work of Sally Mann and Diane Arbus started coming in. Even now, I look at more recent documentary photographers, but I think I still sort of go back to those early ones that made me feel my fire for the medium.
In 1995 I was able to get back into making my own photography again. I was given a commission to photograph residents at the Salvation Army hostel in St. Helens as part of the North West Open – an exhibition that would be at Viewpoint Gallery in Salford and in Open Eye Gallery. The work came about really because my dad had been homeless at the time, and we found him in this hostel. Then when he introduced me to his friends, he would say, ‘This is Bert, Fred, etc’ and they all had a really interesting back story.
I’d always thought hostels were these grim places where people were at the end of their tether. When I got to meet the different men and heard the stories, I found some of them were just gentle old men who didn’t know how to look after themselves, who found a home there, not just a stopping point. I spent quite a while on that project and that spiralled into me looking at people who are not really in control of their own living spaces. And so I started going to care homes, shelters, women’s shelters, children’s homes, and just photographing them.
Sometimes I’d photograph the people, but it was more about them telling me their story. In some cases, it wasn’t appropriate to photograph them, but I’d take photographs of objects associated with their projects (like with the project where I worked with women who had experienced domestic violence). I didn’t show any photographs of any of the women but I worked with their quotes and used images of objects that connected to their experience. It was this project that changed the way I worked and started to get more small project commissions working with local council services and young people. We would go out together to look at where they live, and so I’d take them around with the cameras and we’d let them portray their own area and what they thought of it. I am still working through scanning my archived negatives when I have to double-take to remember all of these projects.
So, I think I’ve always stayed true to being a voice for other people. Because I don’t think I was ever confident speaking myself. But then the more and more I got involved with photography, I think it helped me gain my confidence and my sense of belief of where I sit, if you know what I mean.
Tricia: I am very similar. I love to listen to people’s life stories and life experiences and try to tell their stories through photography. You mentioned Paul Graham before, so he was the first photographer who really inspired me when I was at uni, one of my favourites.
So what do you enjoy most about working in a collaborative way?
Paula: It’s possibly that fusion of ideas that comes about after you’ve met your group. You know, you go with one particular idea, you might be commissioned to explore gun crime in a community, and then you start meeting the mothers of people. Mothers whose children have been murdered, and then all these other scenarios open up in your head – what if I was that person? Your own ideas or experience might be very blinkered, so when you go into a new community, your eyes are open, and you’re listening, and you’re taking notes, and you’re doing your research and everything’s coming at you. And then you start whittling down your project, and with that you start collaborating. And so it becomes less about your view but more about our view.
Tricia: Do you find working in this way brings any barriers? And if so, how do you overcome them?
Paula: If you’re working with community groups, you have to accept that you’re always going to get two sides, you’re going to get people who are receptive and people who don’t respond very well to change. And again, you get your strong characters and passive characters. Sometimes I think one of the biggest barriers is they don’t like someone new, who’s not their own, coming in.
You know, ‘what do you know about our town’, ‘what do you know about my situation’. You have to be diplomatic and, in some ways, not passive, but you have to be open. You need to give people a stage, let them talk to you and tell you why they’re angry.
I think another barrier is actually accessing the community. You know, if you don’t really do your homework, you can end up not really getting to the centre of a community or a group. Sometimes I’ll go to the churches, I’ll go to the organisations, I’ll go to the community groups that are established. And you start to hear names and get suggestions of who to contact. So that barrier, you’re breaking it slowly with the more people that you are meeting, because they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s Paula, she’s a photographer’. Almost treat you like one of their own after a while.
And before you know it, you’re in gossip circles, and they’re telling you tales of old and everything, and that’s where the enjoyment comes in.
Tricia: So once you’ve broken down those barriers, how do you encourage active engagement with your participants?
Paula: It’s usually a marriage of trust. Usually, I’ll go and meet them. I’ve got an agenda because whoever’s paying for the project usually has either targets they want to meet or they’ve got issues that need addressing. So I tend to know which groups I’m going to approach and I do my research. I find out a little bit about the area or a lot about the area. And I might have an overall idea in mind from the brief the commission has given me, but then I start looking for the real people who make up that community and just listen to them over time, looking at their own older pictures of the area and trying to get a sense of how they want to be portrayed or portray themselves for the project.
Tricia: You’ve mentioned the use of archival or people’s old personal photographs. What is it about the use of archival imagery that interests you? Do you think the use of archives is a good way of starting the engagement process by having something to show and discuss?
Paula: I do. I love archival images. I love the use of them. I think nostalgia is a wonderful thing to engage people. There’s nothing more thought-provoking than that image and asking a person, ‘Do you remember this?’
Working at the moment with people in Eccles, you start looking at the archive images and we go down memory lane. But then in Eccles, they’re like very forthright and they take you straight back to reality. And they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, did you get your shoes at Freeman Hardy and Willis, we didn’t have shoes.’ And automatically you’ve got a different conversation going on. And I think that is a great use of archival images – it tells a true story.
I do think nostalgia is an emotion we should cherish but it should come with a warning sign. It’s good to remember the past fondly, but we should also be taking lessons to move on from it and I think the people in the discussions I’ve had do that in their own roundabout way.
Tricia: What do you hope to achieve from this project? And what do you hope the participants will gain from their involvement?
Paula: The main outcome, I think, will be a series of images and an archive because there must be over a hundred images taken and collated already! I hope the images can be used to capture the development of Eccles along the way.
Another outcome is for the people who are involved to do some skill sharing. Local residents have also been the photographers and they’ve been encouraged to discuss their work. Because they might have only seen themselves as amateur photographers before, they haven’t really ever been given the chance to discuss their work properly. I’ve seen people become more confident and even prepare powerpoints of their images to share – it is about giving people that chance to shine.
But there are also friendships being formed through the project, more socialising and collective discussion about the development in Eccles. I can see pride and ownership in the project from the people involved.
You know, at first, as socially engaged practitioners, we try and demonstrate that enthusiasm, don’t we? And it’s so good when it’s taken from you, because you can get on with enjoying directing the project then. But I think the biggest game for me personally would be if after this stage of the project is over they keep meeting, you know, and then friendships are forged and continue.
Tricia: So my final question is, what advice would you give an early career socially engaged photographer like me?
Paula: It’s important to do your research and your planning for whichever group, no matter how small they are. Again, establish yourself with members of the community. You know, I think when I started off early doors, there was no internet, you had to do everything by phone call or knocking on doors, it’s so much easier now.
Don’t focus on one element of the project, let conversations direct you to explore new themes that you think could be a good fit, so this could be the history of a place, its industry and traditions etc.
I think you shouldn’t be afraid to ask people to be part of a project. You know, you’re only going to get two answers yes or no, and in over 30 years I’ve only had a couple of refusals for photographs. If you’re genuine, and you tell them what you’re doing, like when sometimes you might see someone on the street and say, ‘I really want that photograph’, a lot of people are flattered.
Finally, be bold and put your ideas out there no matter how crazy you think they might come across, because people might actually love them and want to get involved.
Text: Tricia Grant-Hanlon
Images: Picturing Eccles project
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