Community and Representation

Chapter 4 explores community photography and the new radicalism it brought to amateur photographic practice during the 1970s. This movement, begun in London and disseminated through the pages of Camerawork magazine, propounded the potential of photography as a form of collective action which could bring communities together and empower individuals. Through groups such as the Shankill Photographic Workshop, Derry Camerawork, and the NorthCentre City Community Action Project, activists taught photography to community organizations, as well as prisoners, the unemployed, and women’s groups. This new form of photographic activism served a variety of functions. It was a form of practice that brought people together and taught unemployed and demoralized residents of the inner-city skills and self-respect. It enabled communities that had become the object of a media gaze which turned their lives into stereotypes to create representations of themselves, which they felt more accurately reflected the reality of their lives. In these evening classes and dark rooms, photography became a mechanism of raising consciousness and building communal cohesion. Moreover, it provided a way of making sense of the agglomeration of power, class, and gaze which rendered the lives of the unemployed, or inner-city residents only as ‘types’, and so provided these new photographers with a way of critiquing—if not resisting—these processes.