Photo Café is an informal discussion and meeting place, an event that invites speakers and participants to discuss ideas, debate topics around contemporary photography issues and network with others. The event is for photographers, artists with a photographic practice, students and general public with an interest in the subject.

Photo Café will feature photographers and artists talking about their work, ideas, audiences and engagement. Our programme of talks and conversations take place on line, via Zoom, you can book your free place via the links below, an email with the link to join the Zoom meeting will be sent out to attendees prior to the talks taking place.

Photo Café with SHOUT Festival, Holly Revell & Laura Chen 
18th November, 6PM, Zoom
Book a free ticket here

Holly Revell:
Holly Revell is an artist, photographer who makes collaborative portraits exploring transforming identities. Projects include ‘Transformations’, photographs reflecting the transition from drag to self in one long-exposure (2016), ‘David Hoyle: Parallel Universe’ photo-book (2017) and her current project ‘People Like Us’, exploring queer masculinity from AFAB (assigned female at birth) perspectives.

Laura Chen:
Laura Chen (b. 1997) is a Dutch image maker and writer based in London, UK. Working within the fields of photography, video, mixed-media and found or archival material, her multidisciplinary practice associates a fine art and documentary approach where research and implementation are closely intertwined.

Recurring themes and interests include identity, memory, tactility, the marginalised, disregarded and overlooked – whether in everyday objects or groups of people who live and work on the fringes of society. Fascinated by observing and recording her daily encounters and whereabouts, she uses photography as a catalyst for her imagination, her camera as a tool and device to make sense of the world and the obscurities of the mundane.

She is currently editorially contributing to GUP Magazine.

Her work has been featured in and published by Photo London, Lensculture, GUP New, Canon, PHmuseum, Life Framer, Shutterhub, Fresh Eyes, Aesthetica Magazine, Musée Magazine, Float Magazine and Intern Magazine, amongst others. She has exhibited at Westergas Amsterdam (NL), Keilepand Rotterdam (NL), Midlands Art Centre (UK) and Ikon Gallery (UK).

In 2020 she graduated from Birmingham City University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Photography. She is currently undertaking a Masters in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster.

Book a free ticket here

Past Photo Café speakers include; Natalie Willatt, Tim Mills, Clare Hewitt, Laura Dicken, Elisa Moris Vai, Lesia Maruschak, Vera Hadzhiyska, Richard Mark Rawlins, Chris Hoare, Kirsty Mackay, Ania Ready, Gianluca Urdioz, Holly Houlton, Paul Romans, Tommy Sussex, Exposure Photography Festival, Emma Palm, Louie Villanueva, Angela Boehm, Dona Schwartz, The Other, Kelly O’Brien, Joanne Coates, Maryam Wahid, Camilla Brown, East Meets West, Multistory, Emma Chetcuti, Jaskirt Boora, Jagdish Patel, Liz Wewiora, Anthony Luvera, Rachel Barker, Sam Ivin, Mark Murphy, Andy Pilsbury, Nilupa Yasmin, Emma Case, Rob Hewitt, Living Memory Project, Geoff Broadway, Adam Neal, Emily Jones, Andrew Jackson, Atillio Fiumarella, Max Kandhola, Faye Claridge, Tom Hicks, Charisse Kenion, Gunhild Thomson, Marcus Thurman, James Abelson, Leanne O’Connor, Lucy Turner, Leah Hickey, Laura Chen, Amanda Holdom, Tia Lloyd, Anand Chhabra, Beth Kane, Chris Neophytou, Jonny Bark, Fraser McGee, Peta Murphy, Red Eye, Duck Rabbit, Lilly Wales, Matthew Finn, Walter Rothwell, Richard Lambert, Anneka French, Caroline Molloy, Tarla Patel and Mark Wright.

Submission Deadline: 7th October 2018

Camera Obscura by David Bethell

Ilam Park, Ilam Holy Cross, near Ashbourne, Staffordshire Moorlands

The work will be in-situ 14 – 22 April 2018

Artist David Bethell is inspired by the rural landscape and natural environment.   He frequently uses performance, film and photography in his work to animate his installations and sculptures within the location and to explore a narrative. GRAIN Projects has commissioned David to create a unique camera obscura for Ilam Park in the Peak District, inspired by the landscape and heritage there and in collaboration with the National Trust.

Ilam Park is a 158-acre country park situated in Ilam, on both banks of the River Manifold five miles north west of Ashbourne, and is owned and managed by the National Trust. The estate includes the remains of Ilam Hall, built in the 1820s.  Nearby, within the village, a Saxon church stands which houses the shrine of a Mercian king.  Most significant is the beautiful landscape, an area of outstanding natural beauty, including Bunster hill just beyond the church and the magnificent example of a picturesque landscape in the foreground.

It is the church that forms the basis and design for David Bethell’s site specific largescale work which functions as a camera obscura. Visitors will be able to engage and experience the surroundings as an inverted landscape from within the installation.   The commission will capture the immense beauty of the surrounding landscape from its position.

For more information on Ilam Park, how to get there and parking arrangements visit; https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ilam-park-dovedale-and-the-white-peak

For more information on David Bethell http://davidbethell.com/

David Bethell Inverted Landscapes writing by Selina Oakes

GRAIN is proud to continue to host a series of talks by artists and photographers.

The talks are programmed in collaboration with our project partners and are often planned to coincide with the regional exhibitions, events and commissions.

In collaboration with Coventry University Photography Department, GRAIN is pleased to announce three new Photographers’ Talks dates.

Trish Morrissey  

Thursday 22nd February 2018, 6pm – 7.30pm

Square One, The Hub, Coventry University, Priory St, Coventry CV1 5QP

£4.00 tickets – click here for tickets and more information

Guy Martin

Wednesday 7th March 2018, 6pm – 7.30pm

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry

£4.00 tickets – click here for tickets and more information

Lua Ribeira

Wednesday 28th March 2018, 6pm – 7.30pm

mac, Birmingham

£4.00 tickets – click here for tickets and more information

To date we have been delighted to host talks by the following;

• Mat Collishaw
• Faye Claridge
• Nathaniel Pitt and Donall Curtin
• Tom Hunter
• Sophy Rickett and Bettina von Zwehl
• Bruce Gilden
• David Birkett
• Daniel Meadows
• Simon Roberts
• Andrew Jackson
• David Hurn
• Matthew Murray
• Liz Hingley

Image Credit: Guy Martin, The Parallel State

We are pleased to produce Noises, an exhibition of works by photographer Lúa Ribeira from the series of the same name, in conjunction with Argentea Gallery, Birmingham.

Argentea Gallery, 30th March-12th May 2018

Noises is inspired by contemporary Jamaican dancehall ritual.  Made in collaboration with a group of British Jamaican women in Birmingham, Ribeira recreated scenes from dancehall culture at the participants’ homes. By embracing the impossibility of fully understanding this cultural expression so very different from her own, Ribeira playfully dissects the ideas of femininity and sexuality within the performances.   Ribeira does not intend the images to comment on the Dancehall, but to become the ritual itself. The power of the transformations of the women and the innovation and provocation that they engage, often clash with Western ideas of femininity. ‘Mythological powers, the concept of female divinity and sacredness in Afro-Caribbean culture, were very present in my visual search. Fed by their folklore and my imagination, universal subjects such as birth, love, death and sex are central to the encounters.’ – Lúa Riberia

The title is borrowed from author Dr Carolyn Cooper’s book ‘Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the”Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture’. Through Noises Ribeira did not attempt to produce a series that reinforced the mass media’s view of dancehall and the female body as a denigration of women.  She did not wish to ignore the display of the participants’ bodies nor their perception of femininity to create westernised versions of the dancehall ritual. Both strategies, she felt, would ultimately fail to acknowledge the complexity of cultural expression.

Recipient of the Jerwood Award and the Firecracker Grant, Noises will be exhibited at Argentea Gallery in early 2018, alongside a limited edition leporello book of the work published by Fishbar Books.

Lúa Ribeira Cendán (born 1986) is a Spanish documentary photographer based in Bristol. She graduated in Graphic Design Degree BAU, Barcelona 2011, and with a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales, Newport in 2016. She was awarded the Jerwood Photoworks Grant 2018, the Reginald Salisbury Fund 2016, Firecracker Grant 2015 and Ditto Press Scholarship in 2015. She has participated in The Independent Air Residency, Denmark 2015, Photo España 2014, Emcontros da Imagem Discovery Awards 2015, Gazebook Photobook Festival 2015,  and ‘A Fine Beginning’, Contemporary Welsh Photography exhibition London 2014 . Her work was selected by Susan Meiselas for inclusion in Raw View magazine’s “Women looking at Women” issue and has featured in the British Journal of Photography.

For the exhibition a new piece of writing has been commissioned by writer, curator and photographer Colin Pantall ‘Lose the Noise and you Lose the Meaning’

Indre Serpytyte (b. 1983 in Palanga, Lithuania) is an artist living and working in London, UK. Serpytyte is concerned with the impact of conflict and war on history and perception.  She works with photography, sculpture and installation. 

Earlier this year GRAIN Projects commissioned Serpytyte to collaborate on research and make new work in response to the history of war and conflict in Birmingham.

It is estimated that throughout both World Wars, the Ministry of Munitions employed around a million female munitions workers in thousands of arms factories. These women played a crucial role in Britain’s strategy of “total war”. especially after Britain’s shell crisis in 1915 when there was a severe shortage of artillery shells on the front line. The women worked extremely long hours as production was focused on a 24-hour shift pattern with only one day off a week.

Using archive material from Birmingham collections as well as from the Imperial War Museum Serpytyte has examined the relationship between widely publicised propaganda images of the female factory workforce, as part of a political project of moral boosting, and the images, accounts and ephemera that tell the largely hidden and forgotten story of the so-called ‘munitionettes.’  In her work she will look at the history of female work and life in the context of war, violence and political strategy as well as the home as a place of waiting, loss and a repository for memory and objects. Domestic objects on shelves and mantlepieces provided keep sakes as well as reminders of lives and death. Most unsettling are the vases made from spent ammunition shells, many of which were made by women in munitions factories and then decorated by women for home ornamentation.

In her work Serpytyte will use these vases as a way to explore the complex relationship between domesticity, ornament, labour, class, gender, war and trauma. The work will explore the objects and materials of war.

Image credit: © IWM (Q 54375) – A female munitions worker operating a chronometer for registering velocity of bullets fired from cartridges at the Kynoch’s factory in Birmingham, 1917

Photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley is collaborating with Syrian individuals who have recently arrived in Coventry on a unique UN programme, to capture the remarkable welcome that the city and refugee centre provide. Interlacing between archival collections and fundamental symbols of contemporary life, Hingley looks to future of the fastest growing city in the UK.

The work references the historic practice of presenting honoured visitors with symbolic keys to the city gates in relation to the sim card given to refugees as soon as they land in the UK. The sim card offers a direct link to scattered loved ones and an archive of photographic memories.  As an object and tool it thus offers an immediate sense of security, identity and home in a new place.

Presented within an intimate installation, items from the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum’s collections portray the cities eclectic history alongside images, which explore how stories and skills from Syria can translate and transform in new contexts.

The exhibition will be on show at the Herbert Art Gallery from the 1st December 2017 to the 11th of February 2018.

This project was commissioned by GRAIN Projects and is generously supported by Arts Council England, Rubery Owen Trust, Coventry University and The Herbert Art Gallery. Enormous thanks is also owed to Coventry City Council, Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre and the participants in the project.

Artist Talk by Liz Hingley 

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum – Learning Space   
Thursday 18th January 2018
4.30 – 6.30pm

Join Hingley at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum on Thursday 18th January to explore the process and creation of this thought provoking exhibition. Tickets are free, but places are limited so please book via our eventbrite page.

Image credit;  Key from the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum Collection

Arena Gallery, Mac, Birmingham

18 November 2017 – 21 January 2018

The project will premier Matthew Murray’s new work which focuses on contemporary photography and the landscape. Murray has created a photographic odyssey, an epic series of landscape works made over a period of four-and-a-half years. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, symposium and newly commissioned writing.

Murray involves the viewer in a series of challenges; aesthetic, emotional, and perhaps even moral. If we look at the pictures without knowledge of the location – and the tragic historical events that took place there – our initial response to the brooding, picturesque terrain may be purely aesthetic. This location seems untouched by human intervention. Murray captures its changing moods under glowering skies, creating impressions, partly real and partly generated through the photographic process. We seem to be in a dream world as much as a real place. In this work Murray occupies a position within a lineage of landscape artists stretching back hundreds of years.

Murray is a Birmingham based photographer who has worked in a gallery context as well as commercially shooting campaigns for various advertising agencies, features for editorials and exhibiting personal photography projects.

In the context of the exhibition Saddleworth, Responding to A Landscape, the symposium will invite acclaimed and outstanding photographers, artists, writers and photography historians to talk about their work and relationship with the landscape. Those speaking alongside Matthew Murray include; Richard Billingham, Jem Southam, Chrystel Lebas, Camilla Brown, Simon Constantine, John Hillman and Mark Wright.

The practitioners will talk about how they have approached landscape and their unique relationship with it.

Image Credit:  Matthew Murray – Saddleworth Moor, Peak District

The project is supported by GRAIN Projects, Arts Council England, Gallery Vassie, mac Birmingham, Pirate Design and the University of Gloucestershire.

GRAIN is pleased to announce the next event in its programme of professional development activities. Our Portfolio Development Day will be delivered at and in partnership with The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, Coventry on Saturday 2nd December 2017.

During the morning our guest expert reviewers will give short presentations and in the afternoon there will be opportunities for one to one portfolio advice and reviews.

We will be joined by Camilla Brown; curator, writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in photography, Craig Ashley; Director of New Art West Midlands, Liz Hingley; British photographer and anthropologist and Anthony Luvera; artist and writer.

The day is devised to enable emerging photographers, students and artists who work in photography to get advice and reviews from leading photography experts.

Please note there will be a maximum of 18 attendees to enable a focussed day. Please book early.

The day is a must for emerging photographers who wish to understand how to develop their work and their portfolio in order to secure new opportunities.

The event is ticketed and places must be booked in advance.

£20 for professionals, concessions for £12
To purchase click here to go to our Eventbrite page.

24th November 2017, 9.30am-5.30pm

Responding to a Landscape will explore, debate and review the evolving relationship between artists and photographers and the landscape.  We will hear from a number of perspectives, from acclaimed practitioners for which landscape is a recurring subject, a social and environmental concern, a research and archive practice and an essential departure.   What does landscape and our natural world look like and mean to photographers and artists today? 

The symposium has been planned in conjunction with the exhibition Matthew Murray’s Saddleworth; Responding to a Landscape, premiered at mac, Birmingham. Murray is interested in depicting the landscape based on what he feels rather than what he sees.  His landscape work is a personal story and odyssey. His Saddleworth is the result of a five year creative and sensitive journey that captures the beauty of the moorland landscape.

The symposium invites acclaimed and outstanding photographers, artists, writers and photography historians to talk about their work and relationship with the landscape. Those speaking alongside Murray include; Richard Billingham, Chrystel Lebas, Jem Southam, Camilla Brown, Simon Constantine, John Hillman, Craig Ashley and Mark Wright. 

The practitioners will talk about how they have approached landscape and their unique relationship with it. Landscape photography has a long and significant history and today approaches have perhaps never been so broad with practitioner’s motivations and aesthetic concerns been varied. Some document, others work with more abstract concerns; Some work collaboratively, others in isolation; Some are working on environmental concerns and others more personal stories.

During the Symposium we will hear from the perspective of the photographer, curator and academic. They are motivated by landscape for many different reasons. We will hear from and celebrate those that create self-initiated projects and commissioned bodies of work and see a range of photographic practices that are at the cutting edge of photography now.

The project is supported by GRAIN Projects, Arts Council England, Gallery Vassie, mac Birmingham, Pirate Design and the University of Gloucestershire.

Prices
Early Bird Concession: £15
Early Bird Standard: £22
Early Bird available until 15^th October 2017.
Concession: £20
Standard: £28

To book your tickets click here.

*Please note prices include tea/coffee in breaks but do not include lunch.

Photo credit: Saddleworth  © Matthew Murray.

Photographer Sam Ivin has worked with individuals and community groups in Stoke on Trent to explore migration to the city. During the residency he has focused on the participant’s personal photographs and stories, working with people who moved to the city from after World War II to the present day.  These include Sikh families in the 1950’s, war veterans, and more recent individuals. They have travelled for a wide range of reasons: professional opportunities, education and refuge from difficult circumstances.

Most participants have engaged with the project through a series of workshops, others through individual meetups.   During the project those taking part have taken photographs, shared photography collections, made photo collages and told their stories, focusing on what led them to live in Stoke-on-Trent. Fascinating, brave and poignant stories have been captured and recorded alongside precious photographs that tell something of the participant’s story.

Photography is part of these people’s journey; from the places and people they left to their new lives in Stoke-on-Trent.  Photographer Sam Ivin has created a new archive of photographs from people’s contributions.  

Sam Ivin is a photographer whose work focuses on social issues and the people connected with them. His pictures attempt to demonstrate the impact situations have on his subjects. By documenting their stories and perspectives he hopes to provide a more personal, tangible understanding of them. He studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport graduating in 2014.  Since then he has been awarded numerous significant photography prizes including the Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award, May 2017, The GMC First Prize, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, March 2017, the Best Graduate Single Image, Runner Up,  British Journal of Photography (BJP) Breakthrough Award 2016 and the Winner of Best Single Image, Human Category at Renaissance Photography Prize 2015.

A selection of the archive, entitled ‘Settling’ will be exhibited in Stoke on Trent at The Big Feast Festival during August 2017.

Image Credit: Walerian ‘Val’ Tyminski
Photographer: Unknown/Possibly Fellow Soldier
Date: 1946
Location: Florence, Giotto’s Bell Tower in the Background.
Description: Val poses for a photograph in Florence. He spent a year in Italy after World War II had ended, occasionally the Polish Army would go on one or two day excursions to nearby places of interest.

The project is a collaboration between GRAIN Projects and Appetite, supported by Arts Council England and is part of the Creative People and Places Programme.

Following an Open Call photographer Sam Ivin has been awarded the new Residency commission in Stoke on Trent. The residency will see Ivin engaging with individuals and communities that moved to or migrated to Stoke-on-Trent from within the UK or internationally. Those that have made their home in the city and work in the city have made Stoke-on-Trent a diverse community and the city it is today.

Photography is part of these people’s journey; from the places and people they left to their new lives in Stoke-on-Trent. These photographs will be in people’s family albums, stored in shoe boxes, treasures and keepsakes for themselves, their families and friends.

Ivin will create an archive of photographs and a new work for exhibition.  The archive will tell the participant’s stories of arriving in the city and where their journey started from.  A positive project, Ivin will celebrate commonalities using images from local people’s own photography collections, having them work with these images to present a contemporary archive and a work for exhibition.

The residency will take place between June – September 2017.

During his previous project, Lingering Ghosts, Ivin visited Sanctus St. Mark’s, a refugee support group based in St. Mark’s church in Stoke-on-Trent.  This body of work, commissioned by Fabrica, Treviso, Italy, saw him working with refugees in all parts of the UK.  Since publishing the award winning and critically acclaimed Lingering Ghosts in February 2016 and exhibiting the work around Europe Ivin has become increasingly interested in the integration of migrants in UK cities.

Ivin will create an archive of photographs focusing on the migrant community in Stoke on Trent by looking back through family and personal archives, having conversations and delivering workshops.   He will investigate the topic of immigration through migrants’ perspectives.

Sam Ivin is a photographer whose work focuses on social issues and the people connected with them. His pictures attempt to demonstrate the impact situations have on his subjects. By documenting their stories and perspectives he hopes to provide a more personal, tangible understanding of them. He studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport graduating in 2014.  Since then he has been awarded numerous significant photography prizes including the Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award, May 2017, The GMC First Prize, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, March 2017, the Best Graduate Single Image, Runner Up,  British Journal of Photography (BJP) Breakthrough Award 2016 and the Winner of Best Single Image, Human Category at Renaissance Photography Prize 2015. www.samivin.com

The project is a collaboration between GRAIN Projects and Appetite, supported by Arts Council England and is part of the Creative People and Places Programme.

Image Credits

Featured image above: Sam Ivin. Pakistan from Lingering Ghosts.  2015, Fabrica, Treviso, Italy.

Sam Ivin.  Sudan from Lingering Ghosts.2015, Fabrica, Treviso, Italy.

Friday 16th June 2017
9:30 am – 17:30 pm
Birmingham City University, The Parkside Building, B4 7BE

The State of Photography II will explore, debate and review how photographers and photography practice develops and responds in our current challenging times. How do we look at our world today and what does the world look like to photographers?

We invite acclaimed and outstanding photographers and artists who document the world around us to showcase their recent work. Each have different approaches to making their work which is issue based. They have been artist, story teller, observer, participant, explorer and poet. Their work has been made through collaboration, participation, community engagement, research and obstinacy.

Some document communities and people they are familiar with others offer external perspectives on social issues and situations. Does one offer a better way to tell a story? Is it important to come from a community or do you become too involved? Is it more objective to come in from the outside? How do we insure the engagement is sincere and does not exploit?

The documentary role of photography is changing, particularly as work is commissioned and made for gallery settings. Photography can impart the greatest truth of our times and sheds light on injustices, inequality and other aspects of our society. It has been and remains one of the strongest vehicles for change as photographers explore polities, gender, society, sexuality, diversity, economics and environment. It seems today – a time of political unrest, flux and crisis – more essential than ever to explore the role that photography can play.

During the Symposium we will hear from the perspective of the photographer, curator and academic. They share our concerns about the present and offer a diverse range of practices, experiences and stories that document the state of humanity and the world today.

The State of Photography Symposium aims to present new bodies of work, question and challenge ideas, as well as offering advice and talking about positive approaches to influence change, provoke, prompt and give a voice.

We will hear from and celebrate those that create self-initiated projects and commissioned bodies of work and see a range of photographic practices that are at the cutting edge of photography now.

Speakers include:

• Andrew Jackson
• Anthony Luvera
• Camilla Brown
• David Severn
• Edgar Martins
• John Hillman
• Kajal Nisha Patel
• Mahtab Hussain
• Michelle Sank
• Paul Herrmann (Redeye)
• Peta Murphy Burke (Arts Council England)
• Simon Constantine

Prices
Early Bird Concession: £15
Early Bird Standard: £18
Early Bird available until 31^st May 2017.
Concession: £18
Standard: £25

To book your tickets click here.

*Please note prices include tea/coffee in breaks but do not include lunch. 

Photo credit: ‘The Bayou of Borba (Portugal)’, from the series Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interudes, 2016 © Edgar Martins.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our photography survey.

During Spring this year we set out to review our current Audience Development Strategy in order to inform our activities including opportunities for emerging artists and curators, new exhibitions, mentoring, professional development courses, events, symposia and commissions.

The research and review was led by independent consultants Wafer Hadley.   The results will be included in a report that will enable planning, programming, audience engagement activities and ongoing support for photographers.

Congratulations to our prize draw winner Katja Ogrin, whose name was chosen at random from all those who completed the survey.

If you would like to receive a summery of the findings, please contact hello@grainphotographyhub.co.uk.

Image credit: Tom Hunter ‘Findings’ commission, Birmingham 2013.

I Sell the Shadow to Save the Substance new work by Lucy Hutchinson is exhibited on The Photographers’ Wall from 2^nd December 2014 – 22^nd February 2015.

The body of work is the result of a residency undertaken by the artist at The Library of Birmingham, awarded by Turning Point West Midlands.

The work is a response to the study of Carte-de-Visite images from the library’s nationally and internationally significant photography collection. The Carte-de-Visite images, taken in Birmingham Studios, document the Victorian middle class dressed up in their finery. Staged against opulent backdrops and scenery the images often contrasted the subjects’ social status by using props as a representation of position and wealth.

In response to these historical images, the artist has developed three female identities. The characters and sets created are representations of women of British middle class heritage who have lived in Hong Kong for a number of years. Using the conventions of classical portrait structure, the presentation of these characters explores how these subjects, who no longer relate to either culture, attempt to remain quintessentially British.

Through combining contemporary and historical status symbols directly associated with ‘Britishness’, ranging from influential designers to ideas of moral hierarchy which are present in the British middle class, the artist has explored how these characters present their status and questions the importance of authenticity in images.

Tbe work is exhibited on The Photographers’ Wall, The Library of Birmingham.

Image Credit: © Lucy Hutchinson

Empire is a fascinating journey across the South Atlantic exploring life on four remote islands – the British Overseas Territories of Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, the Falkland Islands and St Helena – relics of the once formidable British Empire, all intertwined through their shared history.

Jon Tonks began the project in 2007, spending up to a month at a time in each territory, travelling 60,000 miles around the Atlantic via military outposts, low-lit airstrips and a long voyage aboard the last working Royal Mail Ship. Some 400 rolls of film, 24 flights and 32 days at sea later, the resulting work creates an insight into these distant places that resonate with a sense of Britishness which is remarkably recognisable yet inescapably strange. Jon photographed the people, the landscapes and the traces of the past embedded within each territory.

Since completing the project in 2013, he published the book ‘Empire’ through Dewi Lewis publishing. The book contains four chapters looking at each island visited. Through short texts that accompany the pictures, the book combines history and anecdote, telling the story of these remote and remarkable islands, with a curiosity about the lives of these distant lands that remain very firmly British.

As part of this touring exhibition the Library of Birmingham will be exhibiting works in vitrines that show the development of the project, from ephemera collected over the journeys around the Atlantic, to contact sheets from some of the 400 rolls of film shot, through to the 8-sheet prints of the book prior to its binding.

Photographs from the book are being exhibited at the Arena Gallery, mac Birmingham from October 18th 2014 until January 4th 2015.

The touring photography exhibition of Jon Tonks’ Empire was commissioned and co-produced by mac Birmingham, the Library of Birmingham, Ffotogallery, Cardiff and Impressions Gallery, Bradford.

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ WALL has been developed as a space in the Library of Birmingham dedicated to photography and photographers.

Launched in January 2014 the space will feature the works of emerging and established fine art photographers and will highlight the ambition and talent of some of the regions best photographers.

For more details of the forth show featured on The Photographers’ Wall, new work by artist Lucy Hutchinson, click here. The body of work is the result of a residency undertaken at The Library of Birmingham, awarded by Turning Point West Midlands.

From the 25th of February to the 29th of April 2015 the fifth exhibition to feature on The Photographers Wall will be on display. For more information about 5 Plus 5 click here.

GRAIN has been awarded one the 19 AHRC funded CATH (Collaborative Arts Triple Helix) Projects, by the University of Birmingham and the University of Leicester.

Through CATH, GRAIN has established a cross sector team to investigate the shifting value of photography between the archive and audience engagement with it.

Within the context of digital media, the nature of archives in the 21st century is expanding. Whilst photographs continue to be curated and commissioned by cultural organisations, living collections are also being actively produced by wider demographics and archived on the Internet in a variety of ways. The culmination of these activities is arguably represented on the one hand by the intentional ‘public archive’ and, on the other, by the unintentional, ‘people’s photographic archive’ online.

Mining the Archive will explore the different intentional and unintentional archives that focus on two case studies: the previous and current sites of the Library of Birmingham, and the area of the Longbridge which used to be the home of the British Leyland automobile factory. In each case, the intentional archives will be compared to the unintentional archives posted online by individuals through sites such as Flikr, Facebook and Instagram.

Through the comparison of public and personal archives, the project will explore shifting notions of intentionality, value and collecting in order to establish investigate significant themes around what public collections represent in relation to the public(s) themselves, and will have benefit within debates on collection policies of cultural institutions. In addition, the collaboration between the University of Birmingham, GRAIN/Library of Birmingham and the digital SME The Swarm will enable a plural interpretation of the existing and imagined nature of archives in the 21st century.

Image: Francis Frith & Co, Reading Room, Birmingham Reference Library, c1890

The largest regional survey of photography

GRAIN commissioned leading researchers and consultants Wafer Hadley to look at photography audiences in the West Midlands region.  Following the largest survey in the region the results are in and a final report has been produced which will enable GRAIN and the Library of Birmingham to develop activity that is ambitious, relevant and developmental.

The research found that the region has a strong photography tradition but the region’s photography infrastructure has been relatively weak.  As a starting point there was little information on photography audiences and the research was commissioned at a challenging time for arts engagement.    The research showed that GRAIN has a strong foundation to build upon, and its sense of direction is very evident.  GRAIN is in a strong position to engage with existing and potential photography audiences through activity at the Library of Birmingham and regionally with partners and in different locations.

If you would like a copy of the findings of the report please contact hello@grainphotographyhub.co.uk