And back…

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I’m back from my Romania trip today in body, if not quite yet in spirit. After a week-and-a-half somewhat marred for me by illness and culminating with the 19-hour return journey from hell, it’s going to take my weary brain some time to process the huge amount I have seen and learned. I had a brilliant time and was made to feel extremely welcome by the family I was staying with, who let me shoot freely. Whether or not that freedom has translated into images which support the narrative which emerged before my eyes while I was there is another question, one which will take me a little while to work out. This part of my project is not over – I have a few things to do over the coming weeks to tie up loose ends with Ramona, while also ramping up the work with my other subject Lida, with whom I will travel to the Czech Republic in just over a month’s time. I’m not sure how both halves of this project will sit together in the end, or if they even will…in fact I’m still not entirely sure how the work will be presented. I’d be surprised if the second part measures up to the first in terms of its strength but I’m keeping an open mind, while trying not to feel overwhelmed at the very great but exciting task ahead.

So it’s happening…

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Today I’m going to travel to Luton by coach and then fly to small-town Romania, arriving early tomorrow morning. We’re going to Urziceni, a town of 17,000 people about 60km from Bucharest. What I’ll see and learn there I don’t know but at the moment I’m keeping everything crossed that people will be ok with the camera. I doubt I’ll have internet while I’m away so back in 10 days or so… ciao.

A photo drive

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I continued my experiment in collaborative photography yesterday with Lida, with a little drive on which we retraced some of her steps since moving to the UK. She isn’t really that interested in taking photographs – whereas Ramona jumped at my suggestion that I give her a digital camera, Lida said she wasn’t bothered. However, yesterday I was the designated driver and she took the shots using my compact camera. She then wrote the captions as we went along. This is, as I wrote before, an experiment which has come about through my research into the intersection between photography and visual anthropology – and I suppose in many ways it follows on somewhat from my earlier research paper on visual representation of the Roma. Unfortunately for a journalist, I have become profoundly uncomfortable over the course of this MA with the idea that I am in any way putting words into my subjects’ mouths, or speaking for them. There’s a danger, I guess, that using this kind of approach though will weaken my overall project, perhaps making it too bitty or scrapbook like….who knows if it will survive the final edit, but it is something I’ll be dabbling with at least with both women – while continuing to shoot in my own way.

breakthroughs and paradigms

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Slowly slowly I’m feeling more comfortable about my major project. Ironically, after a wobble this week when I attended a tutorial with the brilliant Peter Fraser and completely failed to articulate what I’m doing and why – his response in turn not giving me the encouraging alternative perspective I was hoping for – I am actually feeling better than I was before. As so often is the case, the disappointment of not finding the answers I was looking for in Peter’s session led me to find them independently in the end. Perhaps that is what a good university tutor actually does. After feeling slightly crestfallen and confused for one evening, I turned to the photo theory, sociology and anthropology books I’ve borrowed from a friend and spent the rest of the week ploughing through them. Happily, once I found some chapters I could actually understand, this initial research started to give me a new angle on this project, while at the same time giving me some concrete ideas. So today I started to incorporate some ethnographic techniques into this ‘fieldwork’ stage, to ensure that as far as possible it really will have some elements of genuine collaboration with my subjects…more of which later.

So this week represents a modest breakthrough for me in the way I am thinking about this project, and today I experienced a small parallel breakthrough (or a ‘paradigm shift’ as some of the aforementioned sociology books would have it) with the family of Lida, the young Czech woman I am working with, because I felt that she – and they – finally started to relax with me and my camera. That’s not to say it’s been that fruitful in photographic terms, but it certainly feels like a start. Lida and I also booked flights today for a visit together to the Czech Republic in October. And in seven days’ time I’ll be on my way to Romania with Ramona. Being me and needing something to stress about all the time, my worry has now gone from fear of not getting access to the communities or families I wanted, which I was feeling a few months ago, to worrying how the hell I’m going to shoe-horn all of this into one final project. It’s hardly something I’m going to lose sleep over though – I’m just going to go with the flow.

Liverpool riots aftermath

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ABOVE: An Iraqi Kurdish shopkeeper in his bargain store on Lawrence Road, Wavertree, which was raided by looters on 9 August. The businessman, who prefers to stay anonymous, was alerted by a neighbour and went to guard his shop with several friends – staying from midnight to 7am to prevent more looting. He believes he recognised the raiders on his CCTV, and now wants to close his shop and leave the UK. “They took maybe £5,000 worth of stock and I have no insurance,” he said. “More than the money though, this has hurt me. On the CCTV I can see them laughing as they were doing it. This is not about the shop, it’s about my dignity. The police couldn’t protect my shop and I couldn’t protect my shop. That is a horrible feeling.”

BELOW:

In Toxteth, local people launched a coordinated response aimed at reclaiming their streets in the wake of the violence. The Tiber Project and the Unity Youth and Community Centre, both in the Lodge Lane area, joined with other community organisations to form Toxteth Against the Riots. Concerned residents held a packed emergency meeting and organised themselves into groups which patrolled the streets tirelessly following the first night of trouble. All week, the centre is staying open until the early hours of the morning to provide the volunteers with food and hot drinks. Julie Smith, Unity Centre coordinator (pictured below) said: “It was petrifying, there were police horse charges and the intensity of the gangs which were roaming was scary. Our staff went out, young and old, along with other community members, many of them parents. We had 19 year olds out there trying to talk their peers into taking their hoods down and going home. The adults were telling them the same things but it can have more impact sometimes when other youths are trying to reason with them. I was really proud of our young people that night. A key problem was that a number of people out there causing trouble – especially as it got later – weren’t from L8 and didn’t know us, so our presence didn’t have the same impact on those ones.”

counting the cost – Manchester riots

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I met Neil Mutter, of AE Mutter jewellers in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, at 6am this morning, as he was arriving at his shop to survey the damage from last night’s riot. The business was set up by a great-great uncle in 1884 and has been at its current premises for more than 50 years. He estimates the stock lost last night had a retail value of £75,000. Neil was finding his own jewellery boxes 500 metres away when he parked his car. Despite what he discovered, he was quite philosophical – humorous even – about what had happened. I hope he manages to get his insurance to pay out for his lost stock.

Full gallery here

Kick off – Manchester riots aftermath

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I stayed away from last night’s riots in Manchester city centre as I wasn’t on commission, but when I passed through Salford Precinct a few hours before it all started, I could sense that something was brewing. Like many local people I spent last night glued to my radio and getting increasingly angry about what was happening, and so this morning I got up early to check out how the city was looking. It felt very much like certain kinds of business had been targeted by looters – jewellers, pawn shops, bookies, mobile phone dealers and sports shops. The rest of the centre was relatively clear – the street cleaners had done a good job before I arrived at 6.15am. The atmosphere in Manchester was relatively defiant today but over in Salford people were decidedly jittery and expect more trouble tonight.

What a difference 6 months can make

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I spent this morning watching Ramona, who I’m going to Romania with in a couple of weeks, helping Roma clients with documentation problems at the Manchester Sure Start centre where she is now working much of the time. I am still amazed that when I met her for the first time in February – just six months ago – she was doing this for a living:

This really goes to show how the right support really can make a difference to migrants who are bright and determined to grasp what’s on offer to them. Ramona never went to school and has been in the UK just two years. In that time she has become fluent in English and learned to read and write. She is certainly a special case but a few success stories like her within the Romanian Roma community here is bound to have an impact in terms of raising the younger generation’s aspirations.

In other news, I’ve been reading a borrowed copy of On Being a Photographer (David Hurn and Bill Jay) over the past week and have just got to the part about planning photo essays. Th current project is the first time I’ve been really systematic about what images I’m trying to produce so I was reassured to already be doing more or less what Hurn recommends.