Participatory Photography
14th March 2011
In recent years I have been undertaking work facilitating Participatory Photography workshops. For me as a photojournalist, the idea of the participatory approach is very alluring: by teaching the subjects of photo documentaries how to use cameras, it should be possible to get bodies of work that deal directly and intimately with the issues under inspection, as who would know the details and experiences better than those who make and live them? I also like the idea of removing the voyeuristic aspect of photography. In my own work I sometimes feel uncomfortable photographing intimate situations and often feel like an outsider looking in. The participatory approach can go some way in reducing this.
Having facilitated a number of projects with charitable organisation Photovoice, I was recently asked back by Halton Borough Council, who I had worked with last spring. This project is working with disabled young people and is looking at their experiences of transitioning from youth to adulthood. This is often a negative experience, with service users having to change schools, support workers and move into the adult world, where there can often be less support available.
The group I am working with consists of 10 participants, who have either recently moved to secondary school or are going to this September. I have taught two sessions so far, with two more to go.
In the first session we began with a group conversation about transition, referring to it instead as change. For discussions of this type the help of support workers or school staff is essential. Often, in a group situations, participants can be initially shy, or unable to express their feelings and experiences verbally. Here support staff, who often know their service users well, are able to facilitate these discussions. During these conversations I took notes about each participant for use in later sessions.
The next part of the session involved an introduction to the cameras. I used compact digital cameras and talked the participants through the basic settings: how to turn flash on and off, how to use the self timer, basic composition, framing and how to look at pictures once you have taken them. I use visual aids of the symbols on the cameras to support these techniques. Its is often important to stress the importance of turning the flash off, as I feel that this leads to more interesting pictures, utilising available and ambient light.
The final part of the initial session was a photographic treasure hunt. I normally ask the group to look for shapes, then colours, the shapes of specific colours. During this time I move amongst the participants giving individual support. This can be a good opportunity to get to know the group members personally and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
In the second session I focused on storyboarding the participants’ experiences of transition, using in part the notes made in the first session. I had been worried about this session as it was a large group and normally I had done this activity on a one to one basis. It was clearly impossible to get round 10 participants in the two hour session we had, so I undertook this activity with the whole group. Using large sheets of paper, I went round each group member and asked them about their experiences or expectations of transition. For those that had just moved from one school to another I asked them what they liked and disliked about their old school, the people there and then what they liked or disliked with their new schools. For those about to make a transition, I asked them about their expectations, fears and what they are looking forward to. With each idea that they came up with I asked them how they might show this in a photograph, then drew their ideas in a photo frame on the paper. I opened these ideas to the whole group to increase participation. Some group members can be shy doing these activities so I worked with them individually or let them work with their support workers. I plan that these storyboards will act as a visual reminders for the participants to work from during the gap between workshops.
For the final part of the session I showed them some further camera techniques. Many of the participants in this group had concerns about being small in secondary schools, where other pupils can be much bigger. For these participants I showed them how the can accentuate height by photographing a subject from below and how to make somebody look smaller by photographing them from above. Following on from techniques like these, I asked the participants to move around the building photographing, while I continued to work with them individually.
In my next session with this group I am going to begin editing down the pictures that they have take so far, looking for images than deal with the issues we have discussed. We will also begin to caption these images. I will write another instalment of my experience of this session.
