roots project

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I’ve been scanning old photos again today, after my mum borrowed her siblings’ family albums for me on a recent visit home to Ireland. I never met my maternal grandparents and am in many ways quite disconnected from that side of the family since I’ve been raised in the UK. My mum has few old photos of her own so this was pretty much my first look at them. It’s obvious really but still interesting to me how I can see traits in them which my own family share – the crazy thick hair of my granddad (in the wedding photo), eyes, noses, ears etc. I’ll be recording some of her memories as soon as I get a chance – ie once I finish this MA course – and hopefully making a little photofilm like the one I made featuring my dad.

Tinned up – streetfighters treads the boards

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A few months ago playwright Chris Hoyle got in touch to ask me about my Streetfighters project, which he’d spotted while researching his latest project – a story set on a tinned-up condemned street in Salford.

Tinned Up hits the Lowry theatre in a month’s time – just a mile or so from Seedley and Langworthy, an area of Salford where I got to know a number of residents facing a similar fate (such as Jim and Nancy, on the book cover below). More about Chris’ play here.

If I took one thing away from the very inspiring Amnesty Media Awards earlier this week, it was the sense that I have not tried hard enough to find ways to continue with this project. I’m going to try and put that right.

In transit

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Transition, my collaborative installation show at Liverpool’s Look2011 photography festival, opened on Friday to coincide with the city’s Light Night, the festival opener and the start of the National Photography Symposium. Summer appears to have ended just before we pasted our work onto the containers and since then we have been left with incessant rain. Nevertheless we were really pleased with the number of people who made the short walk (swim?) from the city centre and much further afield to help us mark the occasion, and the prints appear to be staying up ok despite the damp. The collaborative process has at times been a challenging one but I think we are all really pleased with how good the show looks. It’s open for another two weeks so please take the time to visit if you are going to check out Look2011. My personal highlights of this weekend’s symposium were discovering the work of Belfast photographer Paul Seawright and listening to a talk by Dean Chapman from Side Gallery/Amber Collective in Newcastle but it will take me several weeks to get around the whole festival.


T R A N S I T I O N

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My collaborative show kicks off this Friday, part of Liverpool’s Look2011 photography festival. This is what we did yesterday:

AND here’s a write up on the project which I did for Liverpool Confidential

Residents respond to my Roma work

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A couple of weeks ago I received an email from the Hemmons Road Residents Association in Longsight, the area of Manchester where a large number of Romanian Roma have settled over the past few years. They feel their situation has not been well reflected in the work I’ve been doing on the issue, so I offered to post their letter on my website, and to carry it alongside the original story (I have also added it into the PDFs – here and here – of my original Big Issue in the North stories).  I have a lot of sympathy for the community in this area – it’s a very difficult situation and the vast majority of locals are being incredibly tolerant given the circumstances. There are always many perspectives to issues like this and theirs is no less valid. I do hope to find a way to represent their views properly – I am thinking how to do this in a positive and productive way – but I do nevertheless stand by the work I’ve been doing so far on this subject.

ASA Collective – Streetfighters

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Some of my Streetfighters multimedia work is being shown at this ASA Collective event tonight – wish I lived in London so I could go along. Not sure how I made it onto the line-up but I’m grateful for being invited.

Amnesty Media Awards – honourable mention

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I had some cracking news today. I’ve been told by Amnesty International that my Streetfighters project has received an honourable mention in this year’s AI Media Awards, in the digital category.

What makes this even more exciting is that the three shortlisted projects are all by well-funded major news organisations. They are:

Iraq War Logs, Bureau Of Investigative Journalism

Middle East Protests, Guardian Live Blog

and Pakistan Drone Warfare, Channel 4

It’s exciting to be in such esteemed company.