Open Eye Gallery jointly run the MA in Socially Engaged Photography course at the University of Salford. Every year, a handful of graduates come together to exhibit their work in the gallery, and every year you need to see more than they show.
The scale of the show never does justice to the work produced, but when you dig into the projects in more detail, there’s a wealth of exceptional project work, built with and for the community the artists are working with.
Anna Wijnhoven’s ‘Embracing the Inevitable’ shares the end results of her ongoing work with six assisted dying advocates, all supporting the work of Dignity in Dying, a charity advocating for that right in the UK. I don’t know Anna, or her personal relationship to the subject, but there’s an implication with the work, and the work presented by her collaborators shares their lived experience. That’s more important here as part of the perpetual R&D process of this kind of socially engaged practice.
I doubt there’s a better advert for a postgraduate degree, than this scale of evidenced impact. Where the collaborators are given not just a voice but the voice.
In that particular project, its outcomes are predefined by its team and their campaigning, but in the others, there’s a feeling of discovery too.
Working with women from HMP Styal, Isabel Walker and Eleni Karypidou explore ways of sharing in music and dance to offer flexible expression in spaces where movement is extremely prohibitive. The outcomes are obviously positive for well-being, but the process was collaborative and constructive. The results of the project here, very much defined by the participants.
Isabel Walker’s other project is less about active collaboration, and more about observation and learning. Getting to know a community before making work about them. Interview snippets summarise the view of the participants which have, we assume, become the views of the project producer, who started and finished with an open mind.
It’s a great education in social engagement for us as viewers, and hopefully one that inspires some audiences into a new vocation on the same path with Open Eye Gallery helping to steer the course.
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Next Up is at Open Eye Gallery until 16th November
Applications for the course are through: www.salford.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/socially-engaged-photography
Words, Kathryn Wainwright
