Winter 2023/24

As we emerge into the Spring sunshine. I begin to think of longer days, heat on my skin, vitamin D soaking through. Today is the 25th of February and the sound of birds cheeping and the promise of new things hang in the air. From September to April 24 I worked with The New Langdale Photographers a group of learning-disabled photographers based in Blackpool already established for 9 years where we explored civic architecture together. Co-opening a Community Photography Darkroom based at Aunty Social in Blackpool, taking on a new role as Photography Champion with Photoworks. Photographing for new online magazine The Lead, capturing Warm Hubs, Reclaim The Streets Activists, Romany Gypsy Fortune Tellers. Photographing an array of wonderful women from Grange Park a social housing area in Blackpool with a lengthy and interesting history

Robert from The New Langdale Photography Group - Blackpool Promenade North

I believe the blog is dead. But writing about what I have been doing seems to help me. As always as I head towards the end of the Arts Council project grant with New Langdale photographers I feel like I have learned and that the camera continues to teach me about the place where I live, the people I meet, and how I can look at things more closely. Mostly putting my camera down to work with The New Langdale Photographers the best outcomes seemed to come when I was talking to The New Langdalers about framing, or what was in front of the camera, and sharing an experience of where we live taking tram rides to stops designed by JC Robinson The Blackpool Borough Architect or having conversations with people who had relationships with the swimming pools or libraries designed by an architect we still know little about. I want to know more about this kind of practice, photographing the buildings of JC Robinson and talking to the people who experienced the spaces could go on forever. However, I am interested now in how The New Langdale photographers can continue to explore build new relationships, and share their stories and images.

I began to research Neuro Diverse photography projects and came across Polly Braden https://www.pollybraden.com/exhibitions#/out-of-shadows/ which although has some similarities is about the statistic that relates to 7% of people in the criminal justice system have a learning disability. The Through Our Eyes Project is a photographic series and exhibition that addresses inequality in healthcare, education, and employment. Picture Me is a project with Anna Leask exploring how photography is an alternative form of communication for photographers who may have intellectual limitations. Involving Everyone is a project with Rachael Munrow Fawcett which forms an accessible digital photography Inclusion North, to share the lives of people with profound and multiple learning disabilities and their families in the North East of England. As one of the most excluded and vulnerable groups in society, people with profound and multiple learning disabilities are not seen and not heard in our communities. We have also uncovered a photography competition from The Down Syndrome Association https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/our-work/our-voice/my-perspective/ and have eagerly looked at some of the inclusion policies and great work the organisation does. I aim for us (Donna Hannigan and Elizabeth Gomm the practicing photographers on The New Langdale project) to further support The New Langdale/ JC Robinson project by contacting the artists and organisations listed to share knowledge and experience on creating legacy for the work we have created together.

Current work from The New Langdale and JC Robinson Photography series are on display at The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool until the end of March 2024 Grundy Art Gallery Sharing Social Space

Territorial Stigmatisation — photography and mental health

I came across a recent term after beginning to read “Why Culture is Bad for you” mentioned by the BBC Sounds Podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000zdv1 Culture and Privilege.

I fell down a hole as I discovered elements of discussions online of stigma of place or territorial stigmatisation. How residents in areas that have been highlighted with “problems”, hide postcodes or if your accent really did stand out in that zoom session, how you may have attempted to change it.

How culture and participation are measured. Gimme’ a DIY culture any day — is that what we call community?

The Do It Yourself (DiY) ethic seeks to overthrow the idea that we will be provided for. We will provide for ourselves, through educating each other, through collective decision making. It fits into this larger concept of an ideal society.” (Carlsson, p.46 — Interview with Ben Gillock)

Blackpool is known as a place for tourism. Tourism and culture, culture and tourism. I wonder a lot about how that makes residents feel. The barriers that residents might face in a place built for visitors. I feel like I am repeating myself but creativity can be expensive.

Territorial Stigmatisation made me think a lot about language and labels “How easily can we call to mind, irrespective of our geographical locations or professional roles, those places, neighbourhoods, or communities that are the butt of jokes and stereotypes, that are subjected to a repeated ‘punching down’ because of their associations with the presumed sins and failings of poverty?”

As a local sandwich shop owner once told me - he trades in Blackpool but he lives in Lytham, as he gave me a wry smile

The idea that territorial stigmatisation isolates, but we are often not aware we are doing it or having it done to us. Those uncomfortable feelings you might have felt when you stepped in an oh so quite art gallery for the first time or your connection to an area which might be described as problematic — those feelings of getting it wrong.

Shouldn't we all have access to creativity, surely its part of the human condition. Creativity might be sold to us mere mortals though as being a luxury, expensive, risky, and ruled by gatekeepers with the right confidence and connections, not for the working classes. Do we overlook that we the working-class communities have our own culture, customs, capabilities and knowledge.

I worked as a cleaner when I studied art and there were clear power structures amongst that cleaning team. I guess we have all been brought up on hierarchies — humans jostling for position to achieve, even if that does distill down to who gets to use the best feather duster. The UK is after all ran on meritocracy the ultimate hierarchy.

Tell us what to do, here where the land stops and the promise of illuminated lights speak of something super cheery that we cannot quite put our finger on but it seems hopeful.

Meritocracy was most famously argued by Plato, in his book The Republic and stood to become one of the foundations of politics in the Western world. The “most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in terms of tested competency and ability, and most likely, as measured by IQ or standardized achievement tests.”[3] In government and other administrative systems, “meritocracy” refers to a system under which advancement within the system turns on “merits”, like performance, intelligence, credentials, and education. These are often determined through evaluations or examinations.

Seems a good time to mention a young person who attended one of my workshops last week. Alongside encouraging young folks to photograph I use a variety of questions — literally to open up conversations in workshops. I think the question was “What would you change about the world?” She replied, get rid of exams.

My nephew describes high school in Blackpool akin to being in the army. No room for discussions, no space for creativity with his own perception of art being he cannot do it, lots of rules and teachers not staying long enough to really get to know their students, but expecting results, results, results. I asked him to look up George Orwell.

From PhotoSensitive Slow Shutter Workshop Blackpool September 2021

It feels like the only rock and roll thing left might be creativity and while young folks of places like Blackpool do not think they have a voice, what is their alternative for telling their own stories?

Someone told me to “take up more space” — I’m trying, photography is a good tool for that. A camera is a tool for connection, a visual language, opening up areas of audio, conversation, and moving image to embrace mistakes. Mistakes are good — rebel against meritocracy. Of course, I worry about living somewhere that's statistically high regarding socio-economic problems but I also think a lot about the psychology of language surrounding these issues.

In September 2021 I was commissioned to photograph the newly appointed health secretary Sajid Javid. He addressed a closed room of officials in a community space in a large council estate in Blackpool North West UK.

The millionaire’s speech was hard-hitting, reiterating Blackpool’s problems back to the audience.

There were no residents of the council estate present at the meeting although the centre was bustling, the community garden remained relatively unexplored by officials but was concurrently being maintained by local residents as the room was addressed. Creativity outside, meritocracy inside.

The Grange

That message of being told who you are as a resident or person that lives somewhere directly or indirectly has an impact, it takes away license and ownership, does it silence voices by using meritocracy to maintain power, shut down voices from the community, fail to explore complex lives in places such as my home, Blackpool. Does it impact mental health?

To share personal archives, tell a story, be given or give space and time for individuals and groups is powerful, exchange — it feels good for mental health.

I found this exchange for a brief moment, when I spent time with The Electric Soul Singers a community choir, when all the voices sang together, everyone sounded connected, it felt powerful — listen here: The Old Electric

Electric Soul Singers - Kahlil Gibran: “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”

It feels very powerful on how easily music bind people together . For a moment everyone was the same, one voice. A coming together of sound and vibration.

Over a series of weeks, I have been working with a small photography group, attracted to the new community theatre space The Old Electric. We have chatted a little about representation of Blackpool in photography, working-class attitudes, analogue photography, storytelling through photography — we began to naturally make friends with hyperlocal businesses situated nearby The Old Electric.

The Owners of Brens Barista are friends of PhotoSensitive Group based on Queen Street Blackpool. The space is new to Queen Street and named after their dog. They told us they had the best day since arriving in Blackpool with us.

Our most recent session hoped to explore slow shutter suggested by a Photo Sensitive Member — it was a sunny afternoon for slow shutter — so although those images were perhaps not what the group anticipated……

What happened next was unexpected, a shared experience , an exchange— images began to appear out of the group's cameras, a group member shouted out in delight as they found they had captured something they really loved. We were bound together at that moment, conversation was far away from what we did not have in Blackpool right into the moment of physically capturing what we do.

To be fair I had sunsets beaten out of me at art college, warned off photographing or painting the age-old descent of the sun. But Blackpool’s sunsets are celebrated and loved dearly, our murmurations are often overlooked but those residents who know, know. It felt that something reciprocal happened that early evening, that very sunset was captured differently by all of us but at the very same moment of time. That moment was ours — collectively, it was shared.

I visited one of the members photography groups exhibition, staged in a local café where she offered her own story of how photography helped her with mental health through lockdown and beyond. Her images beautifully shot of wildlife, inviting us to perceive a local park land and its creatures portrayed through her own lens.

Exploring mental health through photography (creativereview.co.uk)

PhotoSensitive — North Pier light and clouds

Photography feels especially democratic. The very action of it can feel like therapy.

Earlier in the month I spoke to Sam Batley a photographer working with a recovery living centre for men in Wavertree, Liverpool. His images depict a shared experience stemming from his own lived experience of complex happenings. Stories of addiction often feel compromised, portrayed at a distance, but Sam utilised photography to tell his own story taking the power back. It felt like therapy to look at the images, he mentioned an increasingly widely disseminated TED Talk titled:

“Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong,” British journalist Johann Hari discusses the available research into the underlying causes of addiction and concludes, rather brilliantly, that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection. His statement echoes a theme that I and many 21st Century addiction specialists have espoused for years — that addiction is not about the pleasurable effects of substances, it’s about the user’s inability to connect in healthy ways with other human beings. In other words, addiction is not a substance disorder, it’s a social disorder.

This resonates with me — Blackpool statistically is high for complex issues such as poor mental health and addiction. I think again of Territorial Stigmatisation, of connection to place and community, of the power to tell our own stories through creativity.

I want to finish this post, written as a journal around my Arts Council Funding: Develop Your Creative Practice by recounting a recent meet with a social media friend and perhaps my own search for connection through photography practice.

Asking for help on social media my friend held dearly an analogue negative of her father. I went to see her and she told me she had not really known her dad and possessed a negative of him, a cherished treasure of a blurred memory.

We chatted about a lack of family photos in my own family — images were lost when my parents split as a child with my dad unable to keep hold of family albums due to the pain of my mother leaving. My social media friend and I shared an experience, a feeling of empathy, a connection.

A photograph, a painting or a piece of music or theatre can transport us elsewhere, another time, place — it might bind us together, sharing the love of the same song or being at the same gig back in 1994, a shared love of a book or comedy show, a common experience, a creative happening, a personal story, connectivity to emotion whether that is good or bad — it feels like therapy.

A saved scanned slide of me as a teeny photographed by a neighbour — uncovered 2019. An allergy ridden child. Circa 1977. Lost personal photo albums make me wonder if that is why I take pictures.

”Krauss is one of the earliest pioneers in using people’s personal photography and family albums to assist in mental health counseling and therapy. He co-authored “Photo Therapy and Mental Health” in 1983 that is considered a founding text for the use of photography in therapy

Katie O Brien telling her own stories of complex personal experiences to a Blackpool audience.

Review: Catch 22 at the Old Electric — Blackpool Social Club

I hope for the next Photo Sensitive session to incorporate music, for the group to be inspired by a playlist of music influenced by their own suggestions: what makes them dance, sing, spark memories, music belongs to the people how can it connect to their photography? Could it be a photograph of a personal archive, an image of a space where music played or simply a walk with the playlist.

How we find ways to inspire one another and work collaboratively — what is our connection to place and each other . The playlist can be found here

Part II of DYCP Social and Community Based Photography approaches in Blackpool.

Thoughts on collaboration and photographing Blackpool in a new way (DYCP Part I)

Receiving arts funding seems like a dream. I would never have thought ten years ago struggling in a traditional office job after graduating in 2001 that I would be working anywhere near art, but somehow I managed to sidestep into photography. I identified with artists such as Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, Jo Spence, Gillian Wearing, artists making stories about their own life often with cameras but tapping into notions of music, theatre, advertising.

It was at art school I discovered the photographic darkroom, a place of solace and mostly left empty as students in 2000 moved more towards digital aspects of photography. There was something magical about using a camera, capturing history but also using a camera to create composition, colour, and capturing life (the human condition). How powerful that a camera could be used by anyone and can be so accessible to all telling personal stories enabling us to look back on our ancestor’s life or see ourselves as a baby, could it also be a cathartic tool or a form of therapy? It has been cited that children who are photographed often feel more connected to the world after all a photograph is a tool for sharing experience and shared experience is what I am interested in the most.

Blackpool is somewhat of a mecca for photography so no surprise we have been photographed in a multitude of ways by many notable photographers. It was mentioned that we might also have the largest concentrate of photographers currently photographing the place in 2021.

With this in mind, it seems wholly rewarding to have the current Grundy Show - Seaside Photographed at The Grundy Gallery featuring the work of well-known photographers including Jane Bown, Vanley Burke, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Paul Nash, Martin Parr, and Markéta Luskačová. It isn’t just Blackpool that features in the show but it does feature as you might expect.

Photographing lockdown meant for me and three other Blackpool-based photographers an invitation to sit alongside the exhibition in their forecourt show #Worktownghosttown a series of images of Blackpool in lockdown. “#WORKTOWNGHOSTTOWN draws influence from the Mass-Observation study of Bolton and Blackpool (1937-40), known as the Worktown Project, in which Blackpool was heavily profiled as a site of mass tourism and pilgrimage for working people. Throughout this period of an extended period of intermittent lockdowns the photographers have continued to work where and when possible, to document Blackpool; a storied site of mass tourism and pilgrimage at a time of lockdown, social distancing, and travel restrictions.”

In lockdown, Blackpool felt like it might belong to the residents again, it feels unusual to be a resident in a tourist town, I will talk about that again later. Empty streets meant a cleaner environment, the architecture was easier to see and home felt like a luxury as the town was handed back to the people who live here. Early morning walks created a new appreciation of a town that is often descended on by drunken revelers and time slowed down without the sound of arcades or music being pumped into the air.

I get commissioned to document happenings by arts organisations, artists, civic organisations and Blackpool tourism. But in the back of my mind, my approach to photography hopes to explore something deeper, I don’t feel like a service provider although I am sometimes treated like one creating images for folks’ websites or creative happenings. But there is a different element to creating photographs as there is to all actions, pastimes and in general life, it is all storytelling. Popular media tells us many stories, it separates and quantifies the good stuff from the bad stuff, dishing out labels and status. Culture is appropriated or turned into a commodity if it is deemed good enough. For what is deemed the bad stuff does it feel like something else, does it separate you?

There are always conversations about how photographs of pain are the truth that will spur governments to take a stance to send investment this way. Images of addiction and hunger and poverty are fed again and again to us by mass media or shown in an art gallery of which only a “certain audience” will tour. What will this do?

I found at art college in the south that photography is damn expensive, film, cameras, lenses - historically those cameras are in the hands of folks with dosh and therefore stories are told by people with the dosh (how do we question this). In turn, Photography feels like it has qualities of power especially when we might find well-heeled sorts touring spaces to capture how the other half lives historically? Wielding a lens reflects power, you need only place a DSLR in the hands of a young person to see how transformative holding that object can be. Photography can also be performative, how a photographer stages an image, how a participant responds to a camera - what is inside the frame and what is left out. What is then the exchange between what we are photographing and how we communicate that to a broader audience and feel like we are part of that as a participant in an image and as a photographer/artist?

The term socially engaged practice refers to the practice as art that is collaborative, often participatory, and involves people as the medium or material of the work.

Being a resident in a tourist town is an odd feeling, like a fish in a fishbowl. Blackpool may have had aspirations in the past but in recent times it’s a playground for hen and stags who sometimes seem to forget that people actually do live here. I wonder about labels and limitations put upon us by popular media and our own expectations of a place where accessing something as simple as the beach is not always high up on a local person’s list of things to do, do our well-illuminated promenades make a great background for social disparities. Perhaps lack of investment and lack of opportunity has a different face, communities whose hardship is every day does not always need to be represented by a well-meaning artist or creative, I firmly believe that we should somehow be telling our own stories and that creativity is a human condition in all of us - for me that is the only way it can be empowering.

England's most deprived areas named as Jaywick and Blackpool - BBC News - Article citation “While we welcome funding such as the recently announced Stronger Towns Fund or Future High Streets Fund, what Blackpool really needs is a long-term strategic relationship with central government to solve the unique problems that have led to deprivation on this scale."

How are Blackpool voices heard? I am a Blackpool person, I have lived here all my life - the stories I see, the documentation of deprivation and pain are often removed, packaged up to sell back to us - I feel alienated. They exist I have experienced them but they look very different on closer inspection. Is it uncommon to find artists or communities making work about their own experiences or lives. The best thing I ever heard in a zoom conversation about this very thing was when a broad Manchester voice piped up “Why do photographers/artists like to make work about poor people?” - someone give that woman a camera.

Cups of tea, space, and building relationships - Working with The Old Electric to explore collaborative photographic approaches (Socially engaged practice). The term socially engaged practice refers to the practice as art that is collaborative, often participatory, and involves people as the medium or material of the work.

A Resident in a Tourist Town is the working title of my current Arts Council England DYCP it aims to explore relationships with the new Old Electric Creative Space in Blackpool and its surrounding areas. Photographing and documenting The Old Electric as well as documenting happenings within the space such as community theatre, the actors, and volunteers within the space. I am interested in how photography can be a shared act and the power photography can communicate to demonstrate and capture radical happenings in turn exploring how DIY happenings come up through and are created by the people involved with them.

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighbourhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large.[1] Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.[2]

I have begun to photograph with a small group with varying photography experience questioning how Blackpool is perceived locally and nationally. Exploring how Blackpool has been photographed historically and the stories that have been communicated. A number of images have been created using analog and disposable cameras to create prints at an independent darkroom space in a housing estate in South Blackpool accessible until the end of August 2021. From May to June I set up and spent time in the darkroom close to an area I grew up in aiming to create a shared experience and connection with the community. In this time I created a series of small films, audios, and encouraged residents to share personal photographs and the stories attached to them - The film can be found here “Radishes at Boston Way”

This blog post forms part I of an Arts Council England Award - Social and Community-based photography approaches in Blackpool.

Images: Wonderland at The Old Electric July 2021

Thoughts of magic carried us on. “You put your finger in your ear and say good morning fairies".

Could creativity be many things: Listening, talking, music, gardening, doing our hair, choosing which perfume to wear, cooking, gardening, making  jam, recommending a good book, say like The Twilight series or True Blood, borrowing a glue gun to make a Christmas star or all of these things.

How do we share - space, stories, cake, tea or an experience ? In Blackpool we might have had those shared experiences through galas, celebrations or in the 70’s perhaps at a Northern Soul event dancing at The Mecca or Jenks maybe in recent years playing Bingo or setting up wallpaper tables outside for an epic street party.

“I love dark fantasy! Hit me up with vampires or slayers or elven Queens and I am yours forever”- she said in a whatsapp followed by the suggestion of dancing in the kitchen as we told each other stories through December to April 2020-21. Painting stones exclaiming “Blackpool Rocks” and indeed it did as quiet connections took place in a digital space -  the community found a way.

Christmas arrived and a book or two were left and gratefully exchanged, excited chats covered everything from magic to whose doggie was doing the doo. We said goodbye to 2020 with a Lang may your yung reek & nursed hopeful thoughts for what was next. 

2021 brought us more home-schooling and f**k all………. quiet anarchy and at 11am on a Monday, new lingo through collage and cut outs of statements, lino prints and clay sculptures. If WIFI was weak or digital screens were not a thing - we could still “make” following a set of instructions and a delivery of lollipop sticks or strings and balloons . Go to work, don't go to work, go out, stay in, shake it all about.

We did the lockdown hokey cokey, together -  lost in creativity & conversation.

 An invitation arrived to knit seagulls. - “My wee granny tried to teach me to crochet and knit. She said it was like growing false teeth”. Laughter filled the WhatsApp group and we listened as were told “It may be a messy one! You'll need a cup/bowl half filled with water. A plate/chopping board/smooth surface. A knife and fork. We were unaware that a hundred butterflies would take flight from a skull that day to leave just a memory of a tiny mouse snuggled in a teacup. 

Thoughts of magic carried us on. “You put your finger in your ear and say good morning fairies and then when you leave you put your finger on your nose and say goodbye fairies...everyone knows that, don't they. ...did it with my kids when they were young and still do it now” ...‘Even in the darkness, there is light’.

Reflections from a project around “Estates” in Blackpool & Community Housing.

Community: A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, values, customs, or identity

Housing: houses and flats considered collectively.

Norms: Something that is usual, typical, or standard.

Values: The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.

Customs: A traditional and widely accepted way of behaving or doing something that is specific to a particular society, place, or time.

Identity: The fact of being who or what a person or thing is.

Blackpool Lockdown 2020

Blackpool Lockdown 2020 Pubs and Night Time. Photography

Forever I have lived here, my home town of Blackpool. Except for that one time when I went to university to study Art. Northampton the home of the biggest skatepark in Europe, it was then I was reminded how much I felt about Blackpool.

In Blackpool I could get a taxi within 5 minutes to go anywhere, a choice of an array of bars and some alternative indie or house music nights back in the 90’s. Miles and miles of coast line, an amazing fairground. I thought everywhere as a child had a fair and a beach, I was shocked to find my cousins in Bristol’s closest thing to leisure was The New Forest. Needless to say when I left The Pool — I discovered feeling home sick, especially for the coast line and the friendly northerner.

It was at college I found out I was working class, it had never occurred to me before. I had been into the house music scene and bought into the Orwellian notion that everyone was equal. It was at college that it hit home that some were more equal than others and I searched around for the art that spoke to me…..

I found Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Sam Taylor Wood, Sophie Calle, Bill Viola, Gillian Wearing and all of the YBA’s they spoke to me mainly through photography, theatre and film work. It must have fed into my Blackpool sentimentality of neon and performance, text and fantasy, crowds of people, self and otherness. Was I otherness? Sometimes being northern and coming from Blackpool it felt like it.

This is the place that gets photographed, people travel here to photograph the stags and hens, the blow up penises touring the many bars and pubs, how did this become typical? The tourists were not the people that lived here, I live here. As a teen, I somehow felt embarrassed, the town did not offer me anything. — Now in lockdown, I can see the Victorian buildings, the quite sound of the ocean, no interference of bad pop music or arcade sounds, no being heckled to play the side shows with me retorting, “I’m local”. The town has taken on an “Out of Season” feel. Out of season, the time when Blackpool feels like it might belong to the residents again.

But as it was at university I realise the pull of the place not just for me, but for the visitors that come here.

The pubs and clubs are closed — longing to be filled with Karaoke and Kebab eaters again. I never visited The Tower Lounge when it was open in Blackpool — did I miss ought? For now I will enjoy Blackpool’s new lockdown personality, knowing that one day folks will return to take what is rightfully theirs and I will share my home again.

The Lonely City.

Retiring is not an option if you are an artist, we continue and continue until our bodies let us.

After completing an Arts Council Supported series of images, the #retiredperformers project, I felt like I have learnt so much and realise how far I have got to go. The series taught me about connection, ownership, a sense of place and my own feelings of connection and loss of connection. It makes me think of community and how people come together to share experience, good and bad.

Who owns the story? The #retiredperformers series began from a personal viewpoint, semi autobiographical with a need to explore elements of class and social structure, a want for Blackpool to be seen as a place that is unique and worthy of respect, a place full of hidden stories, built on the “wakes weeks”. A place where my family ended up in the 70’s after my grandparents thought it would be a good idea to buy a Guesthouse here (I still have their guest book - but do not remember the building).

I am not sure whether I am looking for a sense of who I am and the town I live in through the participants in the series. My own family splitting when I was 8 years old and a history of heartache and perhaps loss of identity ensuing.

I forgot to ask my grandparents more stories about this. I remember someone telling me we lived next door to a Grumbleweed and the amazing Blackpool Carnival’s linger in my memory and some of which still exist on Supa 8. I miss my grandparents.

The #retiredperformers project the story of individuals relationship to performance, not always performers who “made it” - what is success anyway?

The participants stories varied, some did a few seasons at The Children’s Ballet or became Circusettes or a Tiller Girl - explaining back stage experiences or the discipline associated with being a performer. This is their story, created through audios and photographs. I realised I did not want to lead the participants, it became as much a journey for me as the photographer, a shared experience with the participant, I wanted them to be themselves.

How do we retell our stories and keep them authentic?

The #retiredperformers series was born from a number of key elements. A portrait of my husbands great grandma who was a Tiller Girl we know nothing about. A retired foot juggler I met while photographing a street festival in Blackpool and my Aunt who was a Circusette at Blackpool Tower - her whole life changed after marrying a German Juggler. https://www.bigissuenorth.com/features/2018/09/time-and-tide/

I think a common connection or experience binds us as human beings, attending a music gig, a performance, youth cultures (where are they now)? Popular press and politics seem to seek to divide and sew fear. We have stopped talking to one another - there is an isolation attached to social media exclaiming our points of view from behind a screen. Or stories re appropriated to serve a purpose or ending up belonging to an organisation or another person. Another Like me perhaps? I realised the gravity of what I was doing after a short time into the series, the gravitas of being allowed into peoples lives, but with hope that the series would allow a sense of respect for Blackpool the people that made it so.

A lady approached me at a showing of the #retiredperformers. “Have you read The Lonely City”?

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her midthirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lonely-City-Adventures-Being-Alone/dp/1250039576

Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

The time might have arrived to really pursue the stories that live in my soul. I think we live in cycles and “what goes around comes around” we visit old ideas, we come across people we have not seen for ages, how do we remember, how do we connect?

Photography is powerful it can allow access it tells a story , it documents, it can alter perceptions, create new perceptions, it captures time.

We must encourage creativity for our children, our friends, our grandparents, the people we meet through shared stories. We must feel confident to tell our own stories, of the places we belong to, the connections we have made from our own point of view to create that connection that we all long for and to tell our stories.

https://www.retiredperformers.com/

Featured image: Entrance at Funny Girls http://funnygirlsonline.co.uk/2-uncategorised/55-a-brief-history