Elvira and Me – final

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So. It’s over. I’ve submitted all my MA work and now just need to physically hand my book in on Monday. Most importantly for me though, this afternoon I’ve given Ramona her hardback copy – which I wanted to do before I shared it online. The reaction was very positive and I am so glad I had the project translated into Romanian (cu multe mulţumiri Daniel şi Dorothea!) because members of her family were immediately able to check it out for themselves…who knows, maybe they will learn something about her.
But now I’m doing that thing which I so often do with my own work – I’m mentally over it before I’ve even showed it to anyone. The dissemination part is something I am fairly weak at, since if I’m honest I shoot/cover stories primarily to indulge my own curiosity. I stick things on my blog and show them to the few colleagues I know well but beyond that am never quite sure what to do with my personal work. Anyway I think this is actually the first time that I’ve been truly proud of a body of work, and I finally feel I’m really saying something worthwhile – no doubt because this project is a collaboration – all I’ve done in this case is act as facilitator, supporting someone else to represent themselves. I intend this to be the start of a larger body of work on the UK’s new Roma communities.

Please check out my book layout.

If viewing on Issuu is a problem, you can download the low-res pdf from here.
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A couple of short clips of Ramona talking can be seen below – she has such an amazing voice that it seems criminal not to share her words. These are not part of my MA submission….

and

Teetering on the brink

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I’m feeling a bit demob happy today – prematurely I’m sure, but I’m on the cusp of finishing my work for my MA and it couldn’t really happen too soon. I’ve loved the past few months and I’m sure I’m going to feel quite bereft once I hand in my work, but part of me is itching to stride out once again into the big wide world of full-time freelancing. I’m a bit sick of spending all my spare time looking at InDesign and am missing working as a proper journalist. I have all but finished my work – once I’ve received my final bit of Romanian translation I’ll be able to order my book, hand in my work, give a copy to Ramona and move forward with my life. Inevitably my mind is now turning to The Next Step – how to get this work in front of people with an interest in such things, and possible ways to take the project further, while keeping it relevant on a journalistic and photographic level and of course being able to still pay the rent. Exciting times ahead.

Roma education report

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A selection of my photographs from Cedar Mount, a high school near my home, has been used to illustrate a study into the experiences of migrant Roma children in UK schools, written by Equality and published by the Roma Education Fund. Cedar Mount has about 100 Romanian Roma children – roughly one in eight pupils – as well as smaller numbers of Roma children from other Eastern European countries. I wrote about the school’s successes – and the challenges it faces – for Times Educational Supplement Magazine earlier this year. One of the things Manchester’s education authority has started doing – with great foresight in my opinion – is employing classroom assistants from the Romanian Roma community, almost all young adults who speak English but have not themselves benefitted from a formal education. There are several reasons for this – it shows the community that they are valued in this city; it raises aspirations by proving to Roma children that they can have the same ambitions and expectations as the rest of us in the UK, and it builds the confidence of this group of adults, who will hopefully go on to become links between different sections of the population. Ramona, who I have been focusing on for my major project, and who appears in the image above, is one of these people and the only woman. The report is available at Equality’s website.

Donovan Wylie’s anxiety

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I took a day off from the mad MA scramble yesterday to catch the Architecture of Conflict conference in Bradford, part of the Ways of Looking festival currently running in the city. There were a couple of particularly interesting talks, the main one for me being Donovan Wylie, who photographed Belfast’s infamous Maze Prison before its demolition, and has who has spent recent years documenting military watchtowers in the Northern Irish borderlands and in Afghanistan.

Wylie, who joined Magnum when he was only in his early 20s, was a really engaging speaker – I appreciated his humbleness and his willingness to reveal his vulnerabilities. He told us that about a decade ago he gave up photography. A self-taught photographer, he had never really studied the history of the medium but when he finally got round to it he ended up getting so tied up in knots over arguments about ethnics, representation, power and all the rest of it that he took almost no photos for two years. In the midst of this professional paralysis, Imperial War Museum approached him to ask whether he would be willing to take on the Maze Prison commission (Wylie is from Belfast and the child of a mixed Catholic-Protestant marriage). And he said no….

Anyway he eventually changed his mind and after lots of agonising he found a way to make the project work, and he describes it as a cathartic process. And from there he has found a voice and style which works for him for the time being. But the interesting – and reassuring thing – for me was that even someone who could outwardly be described as successful and established, a member of Magnum Photos no less, can become, as he put it, “riddled with anxiety” over the ethnical complexities and nuances of particular projects and photography in general. I’m in good company.

Romania outtake 2

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I’m gradually separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and working out a sequence and narrative for the Romanian section of my project. It’s certainly not easy, and the fact that everyone I speak to seems to have a different opinion about how I should go about it only makes it more confusing. As far as possible I’m going to go with my original gut instinct – one of my main issues being that I really want to make sure the tone is right, because the project is very personal. So many things to stress about in the meantime – the essay we have to write to go with it, all the various bits of interview and text I want to include, book design (my main fear at this point) and various other things.

Photo interviewing

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have been experimenting with the anthropological fieldwork technique of photo-elicitation as I work on my Roma project. My initial attempts with Lida, a couple of which I put up on my blog, involved her writing down a few sentences in response to images – so far only photos from her own family album and photos she has taken for me (see a couple here and here). I’ll be continuing to play with this approach as I decide which of my own photos I’ll be using. Last week I had an initial stab at this with Ramona, again with images she has been taking for me with a camera I gave her. In this case it turned out slightly differently – Ramona is new to writing and very under-confident so after a brief aborted attempt I changed tack and recorded what she said. Doing it in this way has both pros and cons in my view. I quite liked the idea of using a little bit of hand-writing next to a select number of photos in my final layout, thinking it would give the project an extra something, so I’m a little disappointed that’s not really going to work. On the upside though, recording certainly results in far more thoughtful and insightful responses. The idea of this part of my project is that it is collaborative so I’m a bit loathe to jumping in and editing down responses for length. I’m realising though that my final layout is going to be pretty text-heavy, which is fine in some senses, I just need to find a way to put it together which doesn’t detract from the images.