I'm just so excited to welcome Julia here tonight to speak to us on making memory visible through photography. Welcome, Julia. Thank you very much, Sarah. And thank you, everyone, for coming. Can you all hear me okay? Wonderful, that's great. I would like to, of course, thank Gresham College for the invitation, Sarah, and also every one of you for coming to Barnett Hall, and those of you who are joining us online for joining us here today. In the presentation, I will talk about the transformative power of photography, which I've experienced firsthand through archival-inspired projects, through teaching photographic projects in higher education, through running photography workshops, and through curated exhibitions where archival photographs were returned to the places where they had originally been made, which has led to powerful engagements with local communities. I have prepared a little roadmap for you just to give you an overview of the presentation and where I want to take you this evening. So I will begin, it's just a little roadmap here. I want to begin with situating my practice and giving you a little sense of the origins of my practice and how I came to this topic. I will then move on to exploring the activation of personal photographic archives and explore with you the idea of how dormant photographs can become active materials through processes of selection, narration, reuse, and sharing. I will present several projects that I've developed over the years and then move on to looking at participant-led projects and living archives. So looking at what I consider living archives, exploring alternatives to the idea of fixed archives, so archives that are constantly in motion, that constantly develop. And we'll focus very much here on collaboration. I will then also talk a little bit about working with professional and institutional archives and working with professional photographers, community institutions, and we'll conclude by looking at the idea of archives for the future. So thinking about photography as an evolving memory practice rather than a closed record. And to context that I wanted to take you back 30 years and start by telling you a little bit about my life then. I was living in Toronto during the 1990s and was studying for a master's degree in social work at the time when I was introduced to the groundbreaking work of British photographer Jo Spence, whose first book, Putting Myself in the Picture, really made a profound impact on me. Spence believed that the personal is political, and she urged others to use your cameras, tape recorders, diaries, to witness your own histories, to learn to protest and share, and to learn to nurture ourselves to make work that is more self-determined. As part of my degree, I had the opportunity to do a six-month placement working with a group of migrant women enrolled on an employment bridging program. I had prepared a session focusing on future goals and aspirations and suggested that we use photography and collage to explore visualizing these. This prompted one of the participants in the group to explain that when she moved to Canada many years previously, she had to completely reinvent herself, and that it felt to her that not only were all of her family photographs still tucked away in a suitcase under her bed, but the person she had been before had to be tucked away too. This powerful comment made us all consider how one could begin to recover and reclaim a more multi-dimensional identity that would join up experiences and make space for a more holistic sense of self. Drawing on the technique of photolicitation, where personal photographs can be used as a prompt to share stories, I suggested an activity where participants could choose five to ten images each from their family albums to reflect on their own life journeys. This was a very powerful and cathartic process as the women shared stories of their lives prior to and since coming to Canada, in the process connecting different times of their lives. The images acted as a holding place for stories to unfold, reframing experiences from an individual perspective and sharing these in a group setting. In response, one of the participants, Josefina Chavez, wrote this beautiful poem. It is time that we discover what we bring with us inside our suitcases, because time passes with us not knowing the value of the treasures that can be found within them. She changed Inside Our Suitcases in the same poem to also say, inside ourselves. So it is time that we discover what we bring with us inside ourselves, reflecting on the increased confidence and deep insights that this more self-determined process had on her. The process made everyone realize that they'd already achieved so much in their lives and had shown a lot of courage. And this also helped to identify future goals with more clarity. While subsequently working in frontline social work for three years, I continued using the techniques of photolicitation, photo storytelling, and photo voice, the sharing of a story, feelings or thoughts through making a small number of new photographs that can be combined with text, noticing that this enabled participants to express themselves more freely. At the same time, I also experimented using collaborative phototherapy with my friend and educator Stephanie Conway. This in turn then inspired me to study photography full-time so that I could further explore the potential of the medium. And I enrolled on a photography BA at the University of Brighton in 1998. So in the next section, I want to look at activating an inherited personal archive. The archive, the project is called Traces. And over the next three years, the course provided an opportunity to develop techniques and gave me space to learn and experiment. During that time, I also worked with several local community organizations that had dark rooms and where photography was used as a tool to document experiences and share stories with participants. I still remember the delight on a new group member's face when they could see a photographic image slowly emerge in the developer tray, making visible the latent image of the moment they had photographed. During my studies, I lived in a bungalow in Peacehaven just outside of Brighton, which had belonged to my late great-aunt Martha Hecker. I discovered an old leather suitcase in the attic. I learned that this suitcase had belonged to her husband, my great uncle, Hugo Hecker, who had escaped from Vienna to England in the summer of 1939. A small number of personal objects were also inside the suitcase, and I had previously given the only two surviving, I had previously been given the only two surviving photographs of his family by my mother. I already knew that out of Hugo's large extended family, only two brothers and two young nieces had survived the Holocaust. Hugo's parents and four of his siblings and their families were murdered. In his lifetime, Hugo, traumatized by the war, did not speak about his enormous loss. So I began working on this project as an attempt to preserve the memory of the Hecker family through photography. I also found an old doll's house that had been discarded by the roadside and brought this home. I decided to use it as a container to hold the broken and fragmented story of the family. I then made slides of each individual person and we photographed person by person, projecting the slides into the doll's house so that each one had their own photographic space. The more I zoomed in on their individual faces, and the larger these became, the more they turned into abstract shadows as facial contours dissolved again. I also carried out extensive research in various archives, including at the Vienna Library and Imperial War Museum in London, and then traveled to Poland to take photographs on location, trying to find further traces of the Hecke family. So in Krakow, I visited the former Jewish ghetto area and also went to several archives. And then I also traveled to Strumien, which is the town where the Hecke family had lived for many decades and had owned a clothing shop. I'd taken two copies of the two original photographs with me and simply approached passers-by to see if anyone had memories of the shop or the family, and eventually encountered a young woman who was working in a small grocer's who agreed to take copies of these two small photographs home to show her grandfather. She called me the next day to say that he could recall the family, and he even recalled which road they had lived in, saying only that he thought they had to leave because of Hitler. I also visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is only 40 kilometers from Strumien, where I took photographs of the railway tracks leading up to the entrance of the camp. On my return to England, I projected all of these new images into the same doll's house. This process developed into the project Traces through which I sought to witness, search for, and preserve the memory of the Hector family, and more broadly wanted to reflect on the expressible loss of life. The photo historian Marian Hirsch terms this form of memory work post-memory. She writes that through an active engagement with archival photographs, documents, and objects, we can connect with the past that predates our own. This form of memory, as opposed to communicative memory, cannot be mediated through personal recollection as it relates to a time outside of our own living memory, but rather it requires a form of imaginative investment and creation. The Traces project was subsequently exhibited in Germany, the UK, France, and Poland, where the photographs became the starting point for workshops and exchanges. One invaluable outcome was contact with Polish lawyer and sociologist Wojciech Kiłkowski, who was writing a thesis on the fate of Jewish communities from that region. He unearthed archival material from various state archives, which provided a rich and detailed picture of the Hecar family's involvement in the life of their community up until the late 1930s, which he generously shared with me. In the next section, I want to now look at a project that navigated communicative and cultural memory. The project is called Two Sisters. So, in contrast to the previous project, which had relied entirely on post-memory, for my next project, I wanted to engage with the communicative memory of my maternal grandmother, Vicky, who was Martha's sister, juxtaposing Martha and Vicky's contrasting wartime experiences through an engagement with personal family photographs, albums, documents, letters, objects, and cassette recordings. Handling these personal possessions created a strong emotional bond for me. This prompted visits to further archives in Berlin, London, and the Isle of Mann, where additional material was discovered, including a photograph of my great aunt, which had been used for her internment document, which no one in our family had seen before. And the examination of culture memories contrasted with the personal accounts of my grandmother and the audio recordings that my great aunt had made during her lifetime. Here I sought to position photography as a bridge between these complementary forms of memory, intercrossing histories and viewpoints. The sociologists Werner and Zimmermann write about this relational entanglement and their work combining past and present perspectives, overlapping histories and temporalities, which they termed histoire croisé, regard croisé, intercrossing histories, intercrossing viewpoints. My maternal great-aunt had moved to England in 1933 from Germany, and within a few months of the outbreak of World War II, she had been interned as an enemy alien, initially in Holloway Prison in London, and from July 1940 in Port Erin on the Isle of Man. During internment, she embroidered her internment journey onto a white cotton handkerchief, which remains a crucial artifact for grounding her internment experiences. I used the handkerchief to create a textured effect and background onto which I projected mediated visual impressions of her journey, which I recreated by sea and train and on location on the Isle of Man. By this method, I hoped to find ways of revealing some glimpses of her own experience. Simultaneously, I sought to mediate my grandmother's personal memories of living in Berlin during that period. I went to Berlin having followed up on her wartime recollections. While she could vividly remember sounds and smells of burning, she was much vaguer about dates and details. And on the picture on the left-hand side is the collage which shows my mother at the age of two during the war. The project concluded with an exhibition at the Manx National Heritage Museum, where it brought together the varied elements, bringing my grandmother into the space through a contemporary portrait of her alongside poignant inherited objects belonging to Martha, including a framed photograph of her and Hugo taken shortly before Hugo's passing. The gallery space was filled with a soundscape derived from the voices of the two sisters. During gallery tours and talks, visitors had opportunities to share personal memories, and several older residents told me that they had vivid memories of the time when nearly 30,000 internees had to stay on the island. Alaida Osmann, the German cultural historian, distinguishes between three forms of memory. She discusses personal or individual memory, collective memory, and cultural memory, and explains that they do not exist in opposition to each other, but work together in really complex ways. She explores the significance of these forms of memory in mediating, remembering, but also forgetting past experiences, and draws useful distinctions between what she calls episodic memory, what has been experienced, and semantic memory, which is based on what we have read or learned, and which draws from cultural memory. I now want to turn to participant-led projects and living archives and the project stories from Agadez. My first degree was in anthropology and African studies, and in 2006 I was contacted by an old school friend, Thomas Knoll, who at the time was working for an NGO in Niger. He had remembered that I had written an essay on the enlightened 19th-century traveller and scholar Heinrich Barth and informed me that there was a museum dedicated to the memory of Barth in Agadez. I was able to obtain funding from the Arts Council, and Thomas facilitated a research trip and series of workshops in conjunction with Hetamatt, a locally based NGO that works closely with community engagement. Over several weeks, and under the guidance of community members, I was able to footstep Heinrich Barth's journey, as detailed in his extensive diaries, and also spend time on the compound that is home to the Barth Museum. In the compound, I was shown many objects, including travel trunks and saddlebag and so on, that I was told had belonged to Heinrich Barth and that he'd left behind on location. But I was also taken to meet the Sultan of Agadez, who Bart had met in 1850. And I was also taken to the local mosque and was allowed to climb to the top of the mosque and take this aerial photograph of Agadez from the top of the mosque. While there, I also coordinated a participant-led photography project which captures the stories and images of four adults and four young people who were inspired by our discussions of the innovative approach taken by Barth, whose fluency in Arabic and several African languages, including Hausa and Songhai, allowed him to directly record oral histories. These were enhanced by Barth through accomplished sketches and maps. The participants were invited to record any aspects of their lives that were meaningful to them and that they would like to share with audiences in other places. Their focus was primarily on family work, including celebrating the important work that women undertake, on community, but also on the importance of cultural heritage and the opportunities to record memories through photography. So, for example, Usman Adamou had a football team, it was called Ayas Roma, and he photographed his players and took a whole role of film photographing the players of Aes Roma. And his photographs were later featured in an Italian magazine called Capusut, highlighting his work. Raisa Ladi was only nine, she was the youngest participant in the project. Raisa photographed her family and commented on, wrote about the photos she had taken, commented on why she had taken them, what they meant to her, what she liked about them. And she also took these, I think, extraordinary photographs of a friend of hers, where her attention to colour, to composition were absolutely outstanding. Rakya Muhammadu wanted to become a teacher, and she wrote about enjoying very much working with the children when they came home from Quran school, pretending that she was her teacher and helping them with her home, with their homework. So she took photographs of the children, of women working. And Mohammed Tambo, who was a school teacher, focused on the infrastructure of Agadis. He wanted to highlight the old town and the new town, how perhaps aspects of the old town were more communally oriented, and aspects of the new town perhaps engendered a sense of alienation. And he documented various locations and also wrote about the narrow and quiet roads that keep the memory of bygone times and the modern part of the town with its straight roads and a lot of commotion. But he also said that he thought history was important as it allows us to situate ourselves within the context in which we live. It helps us try and give meaning to what we will do tomorrow. Here are some of his photographs. And they were taken, some of them were taken from his motorbike, and you can see the mirror of the motorbike in the right-hand bottom corner of the picture on the left-hand side. Hajaragrama Hassan was working for the Red Cross at the time and really wanted to focus on the work of women, which he did in her photographs. Whereas Sareet Efes Hamad al-Hair used photography deliberately, and he says so in his text, because he said photography allows us to relive the past and is also a great passion of life. And he also said in his text, I hope that these photos make you discover the beauty of this country and the fantastic potential it has. So when we did the project, everyone had a camera and we processed the films on location. People could then edit the photographs they liked, and they also wrote a short text that accompanied the photographs. And you can see in all the slides the text that they wrote on the left-hand side next to the portraits. And these are Sarit's portraits celebrating communities, celebrating family. These photographs are now part of a living community archive and represent an important impression of life in Agadez, recorded by a small number of residents at a very specific moment in their lives. Subsequently, I was able to show these photographs at London's Brunei Gallery, and the first thing gallery visitors would encounter was Mohammed's comment on the importance of history in maintaining a cultural identity. And above his comment was the portrait of the Sultan of Agadez, who was meeting visitors on the space. Visitors were also able to engage with archival objects and audio recordings that I had collected with community elders, with teachers and young people during my stay. Several hundred school children from various London. Boroughs came to see the exhibition. And together with artist and educator Anita Chowdhury, we ran photography and writing workshops in the space. Young people had the opportunity to share their own stories and also to write postcards to the eight Agadez-based community photographers, commenting on their photographs and stories, and these postcards were then returned by a diplomatic post to ensure that the photographers got them. And some of the photographers I'm still in touch with today, including Sarit Efes Hamad al-Hair. Research for the project also led me to the story of Abega and Durugu, who had accompanied Bart as guides on his expedition and travelled back to England and Germany from Timbuktu with him in the 1850s. Durugu's account of these journeys offers a fascinating parallel insight to Bart's expedition. We know about Durugu's experiences as they were recorded in the Maganaha Usa, published in 1885, and rediscovered by Paul Newman at Yale University in 1970, who notes that the book had not been borrowed since 1890. This rare eyewitness account was published by Newman and his colleague Kirk Green as the 1971 West African Travels and Adventures where I first found it. And I'm very pleased to say, I think he's sitting here at the back now, that professors Paul and Roxana Newman are with us in the audience tonight. A particularly rewarding outcome of this project is that the charity Martinikane got in touch with me and subsequently published Derugu's account in Hausa through a Niger-based publisher. And this has now become a standard school textbook in Niger. Durugu's story is now accessible to all school children there. And it's a wonderful parallel account because Durugu went to Berlin, he went to England, he describes a Victorian dinner and his observations using Barthes' approach, using his methodologies. And he lived in Rochester in Kent for seven years before he returned to northern Niger. Around the same time I was working on this project, I was also engaged on a collaborative project with the artist Nerea Martinez de Lessilla, which explored themes of cultural displacement. I'm not talking about this project here, but our joint project led us on to working with Brighton-based interpreters who provided interpreting services utilized by local agencies. Over a period of several months and combining creative writing, poetry, collaborative portraiture, and drawing, the participants produced the body of work reflecting on their own experiences of displacement. The Brighton Photo Biennial funded a publication, and the work was subsequently exhibited at the University of Brighton. The participants sought to create testimonials about the challenges of their work as interpreters and the impact this also had on their own experiences. The title of the project, A Country I Always Carry With Me, came out of a responsive text written by Mustafa Mezinoglu, a Turkish interpreter, who had observed that however far away I seem to go from the places where I grew up, my mother tongue is a country I always carry with me. And he also responded through drawings and poetry and working with projections for the project. Christine Graham, who translated from Key Swahili to English, reflected on the embodiment of communication to enhance verbal comprehension when she would interpret for people and emphasized that through her photographs. Serge Clifford, who was a translator from French and Creole into English, considered the importance of objects and especially music in defining his sense of identity, but at the same time also expressed his sadness and feelings of loss. And in response to an old vinyl record that he had, he wrote, Where did you come from? I knew once. Now I have forgotten. Too much time has passed. Those that are left too young or too old, too uprooted to remember. Between 2006 and 2018, I was engaged on the Through Our Eyes project as a curriculum developer and art education trainer run by the Robert H. ⁇ Ho Foundation in Hong Kong. Each year there was a different theme from exploring personal identity to working with family archives to exploring memory landscapes and unfolding stories. Through several sharing workshops, I was involved in the training of artist educators who worked with young people in schools and community centers and in after-school clubs across the whole territory, using photography as a creative and a reflective tool. Each year there would be a number of exhibitions and publications highlighting some of the work made by participants. So here I just want to share a couple of project examples which focus on working with objects using drawing, writing, overlay, and self-portraiture. And I selected here for you just an example by Kwok, who combined two archival photographs of her parents from a time before she was born with an old teapot, with a teapot and some sage. And she made this photograph and also drawing of the teapot and wrote this very beautiful, sweet story to accompany her photograph from the perspective of the Chinese teapot. She writes, I'm a traditional Chinese teapot, a beautiful teapot. Five years ago I was sold to a family of five. Since then, I have enjoyed an ordinary yet happy life. Although the children, two boys and one girl, do not pay much attention to me, father and mother love me very much. After each meal, they share the aroma of tea with me. As time goes by and my body stains, I hope they will not forget our life together now and forever. For this dip-ditch, Angelique made two very different kinds of self-portraits. In one, she held up a framed print of dried flowers, which she had gifted her mother, writing that she chose to hold this frame in the picture as she'd like to observe how her mother had reacted to the gift, which she also felt symbolized her life. But she also adds the line, but there is more than meets the eye. These framed flowers can appeal as happy or sad memories. And on the right hand side, under Shadow Puppets, she worked with projectioned overlay. And you may recall Mustafa Merzinoblu's photograph, which I showed you just a few minutes ago from A Country I Always Carry with me. I'd shown this photograph by Mustafa in one of the workshops, and Angelique used it as a backdrop to make a new photograph. Here she positions herself in front of Mustafa's projected image. You can see her shadow outline in front of the projection. And she writes, most of us have lost control of our lies. We need to cut these strings of control and start driving our own lies. We need to get out of the shadows and be heard. Don't be a shadow puppet. How to visualize, represent a sense of self and affirm one's identity were strong themes throughout the duration of the Through Our Eyes project. Here, War experimented with portraiture and drawing, reflecting that the process of making this work has given her a much better self-understanding and that she will continue to be the way she is. She writes here, I've discovered that my personality and the way I think are often opposite to other people, but I don't feel that I'm doing anything wrong. I will continue being this way because this is who I am. Each year, photographs were shown in different places, from pop-up exhibitions to gallery or school settings across the Hong Kong territory. One year the photographs were projected into shop windows and doorways in an old traditional part of the city, with many of the shops having already been shut down prior to demolition. I now want to move on to a module that I taught at the University of Brighton for a long time, called Experimental Archaeology Within and Beyond the Photographic Archive. So I have been working at the University of Brighton since 2003, a very long time. And over time I've developed a whole range of modules working with participatory and community-led photography. One of the modules I designed was called Experimental Archaeology. As part of this module, students were encouraged to engage with a wide range of archival material, family of found photographs, objects, documents, as a starting point for new photographic projects. We also, as part of the module, visited several institutional archives, including the Haltongeti Picture Archives in London, various local archives around the Brighton area, so that students could see how archival photographs are collected and how they're preserved. This would also lead on to discussions around what constitutes an archive or how a collection is defined, archival collecting processes of exclusion, omission, discarding, accumulation, and how even in a secure archive there's no guarantee of perpetual preservation of photographs. As an example, I shared with them my own archival finds of albums and photographs rescued from local authority tips, skips, or on troll through flea markets. The Victorian album you've just seen, I literally pulled out of a skip. Someone had just thrown it out. I would also tell the students about an installation piece by Max Dean, an artist who works with found family photographs. In this piece, Dean asks whether images have lost their original owners and context and therefore become devoid of meaning, or whether we have a responsibility to rescue photographs from final destruction. He also asks if they can be infused with new life. So in this installation piece, which is called As Yet Untitled, he invites viewers to step in and prevent a robotic machine from shredding found family photographs. Visitors had the opportunity to decide the fate of these images. So you could step up, put your hands on those two black hands, and that would stop the robot from shredding the images. You could then claim the photographs, but they also became the responsibility of the new owner. After the introduction to this installation piece, we would also do a simulation of a similar exercise. I would bring in found photographs and ask students to intuitively select one of them and just try to step into one of these photographs and speak from the perspective of one of the sitters. This would often lead to students developing a real sense of empathy through the process of slow looking and also by using their own imaginative investment. So what the photohistorian Roland Barth calls the there then at that moment in time became the here now. But this exercise also helped people to reflect on the simultaneous presence of the photograph they inhabited while also acting as a stark reminder of the sitter's absence and the time that had passed. Which is something that John Berger has written about in A Seventh Man, where he describes a photograph and says, A friend came to see me in a dream from far away, and I asked in the dream, Did you come by photograph or train? All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence. And when I found this postcard in a local flea market of a lady called Wynne from 1912, where she sits at Funland on the Edgeware Road and she says, I'm off, goodbye. We also have a little bit of text here. It reminded me or it made me think of this idea of the expression of absence and presence at the same time. I've included in this presentation a small selection of project examples that were included and published in a book called Phototherapy and Therapeutic Uses of Photography in a Digital Age. And I want to begin with Donna's example. Donna had lost her grandmother who had lived abroad. Before she and her parents could get to the grandmother's place, the local council had already cleared her grandmother's flat, as another family member had given permission to the council to do this. Donna felt bereft at the loss of her grandmother's photo albums. She reflected that she had not realized before doing this project how much I missed not having a substantial historical photographic record of my grandparents and distant relatives. During this project helped me to accept this reality. Instead, Donna resorted to working with a small collection of found images, which she had sourced at a local antiques market. Each photograph depicted the same woman but at different stages of her life. Donna connected with this unknown woman and used those photographs as a stand-in for the loss of her own grandmother's photographs. As part of the project, she wrote a letter to her grandmother, sharing her feelings for her, also saying that to find this way of working and using photography as a means to both work through and process unresolved emotions was refreshing at a time when I was questioning how and why I wanted to make photographic work. And the project was called absent loss. The next example is by Richard Clayton, who used a photograph of his parents that had been taken shortly before his parents had met. He made a slide which he then projected into a photographic studio space and then took another photograph of himself standing in that space, looking at the photograph, looking at his parents, as they appear in the photograph to be walking towards him. He explains, as I project myself back into their past, I do not recognize the people I see before me, but my mother seemingly looks up, smiles, and sees me. Even though I would not be born for another 20 years, she recognizes me as a ghost from her future life, a life she is just beginning to imagine. Now I'm really honored to say that the next person I'm talking about is actually here with us tonight, Holly Oliver, which is a wonderful, wonderful gift to all of us. So it's an honor, Holly, for me to talk about your project. And I kind of feel Holly should be here with me. Maybe you can afterwards through the Q ⁇ A also talk about this project. So Holly wanted to make a photograph, wanted to make a project about her sister Amber, who had died following a short illness at a young age before Holly was born. With her mother's support and encouragement, Holly decided to reinsert photographs of her sister into the same spaces of the family home that the family had continued to live in. Holly had decided that she would take these new photographs herself, holding the archival image in one hand while also having to hold her camera in the other hand to focus and press the shutter. She also sought to emulate the muted and natural colours that the original photographs had. As the past is anchored firmly in the camera's frame and is foregrounded, the present seems to slip away as the background is deliberately slightly blurred. Holly's dual role as family archivist and contemporary image maker reintroduces her sister Amber into the home. Her methodology both contains and preserves the photographs of her sister, and she also articulates a relationship with her. Subsequently, Holly wrote that it had been important to have left home, to have gone to uni, and to have returned and to take have taken out the albums. The photos did not often get looked at, but we knew they were there. The process of going through the archive was painful. The prints I took are on the wall in the staircase now. My mother put them up. I hope you can talk to Holly later. And as I mentioned, this is published in a book called Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age, which included other stories. And this book has just is just about to be republished again as a second edition. So if you want to read more about this module and the processes, you can have a look at this publication. I now want to move on to working with professional and institutional archives and give you just a couple of examples here of other engagements with archival material. Over my career, I've had the immense privilege to work with several professional photographers' archives, and in some instances also to get to know and become friends with the photographer. I've selected a small number of projects representing this strand of my research to illustrate ways in which these archives can be reassessed and mobilized to reconnect with the communities where the original images were taken. I've also included an example of a local community archive that ended up being stored in an institutional archive. So I want to begin by looking at the professional archive of civil engineer Mocte Lethieri. This is a project that I worked on, an interdisciplinary project that I worked on with colleagues from the University of Brighton. It was led by Dr. Carpenter Lethieri, Dora Carpenter Lethieri, a writer, academic, and artist from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, whose father was the eminent Tunisian engineer Mokta Lethieri, and along with another colleague, Dr. Karin Jaske, from the School of Architecture. We received an exploratory grant to view Mokta Lethieri's extensive photographic archive documenting the post-colonial reconstruction period, the country's infrastructure in rural and urban development. Following Tunisian independence in 1958, Mokta Letieri became the lead engineer of public works. In this role, he was responsible for the design of major buildings and infrastructures across the whole country, including the international airports in Tunis and Java and the port of Garbès. The three of us traveled to Tunis to engage with the archive, which was still stored in folders and boxes across many bookcases at the family home of the engineer who'd passed away two years earlier. During our stay, we also visited some of the locations featured in his photographs and made responsive images. Lethierry had documented the old city wall, the entrance of La Goulette, where a natural channel had once connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Lake of Tunis. And you can see that there's now a road where there once was this channel. In Matmata, in southern Tunisia, we met with residents from local communities, including the Berber women Fatma Nasser and Mongiela Ribi, who shared their own experiences and stories with us. Dr. Carpenter Lethieri continued to progress the project, organizing conferences and writing several publications, including a definitive book about her father's life and work, which interweaves his biography with photographs, documents, texts from the archive, and her own images. The National School for Engineers in Tunis, which Mokte Lethieri founded and led, now houses some of his photographic archive, and other elements of the archive will soon be held in the National Archives of Tunis. I want to give you just one example of working with the community archive, which I've called unpacking the history of the memory of a town as opposed to unpacking a suitcase. Because I continued to live in my great-aunt's house in Peacehaven after completing my degree, and over the years became very embedded and attached to the location. I started documenting the changes I saw happening around me, and I learned more about Peacehaven's unique history in Genesis as an interwar speculative development promoted as an edenic garden city by the sea. Through frequent visits to the town's library, Michelle Brucker, the librarian, tipped me off that a large collection had been donated. This was the Troke-Poplit collection began by two local collectors, Bob Poplett and Malcolm Troke, and amalgamated after their death. It contained 21 archive boxes full of blueprints, photographs, documents, and other ephemera relating to the town's inception and early history. I realized that along with the several years of earlier research I'd embarked upon, this would be a great subject for a PhD, which I completed and called Fabricating Lurland, and was published as a book in 2022. In addition to doing a lot of archival research, I was also put in touch with the local heritage lottery grant initiative and was asked to develop workshops and facilitate reminiscence sessions at the library with older residents who wanted to share their memories and experiences and also learn more about the town's history. The score of the group coalesced into a regular meeting and called themselves the Peacehaven Pioneers, as many of them had grown up in Peacehaven during the interwar period and also the early stages of the town's development. Again, we used photolicitation and creative writing sessions, and participants recorded their own experiences, which we put together into a traveling exhibition and a community calendar. We also went on field trips to the county archives at the Keep and Brighton University Library. The group continued to meet for many years every month at the Peacehaven Library, engaging with the collection before it was finally moved to the Keep. Encouraged by the participatory engagement exercises, the participants began to appreciate the significance and value of sharing their own life stories and how these connected to the history of memory of place and their community. They also gave me permission to include these stories and photographs in my publication. I just want to give you one example here by Reuben Lennon. This is an example out of about 25 examples, so it's really hard to select one. But Reuben Lanham, who was a retired school teacher, in response to his own photographs and making timelines about how his own life intersects with the history of the town, wrote, Peacehaven was born seven years before me. It was a hybrid, unsure of where it belonged. Whether to the Wild West or suburbia, I noticed some interesting traces of an early existence, one that partook of the ancient villages around, a flint wall here and there, a wall that had once been in use, remnants of a sunken road that still bore a few primroses on its banks. As part of this project, we also organized several site-specific events where we utilized the promenade and cliff face in Peacehaven for various projections. For example, as part of the town centenary in 2016, which marked the centenary of the town's original inception, our event was referred to as our story on the cliffs, and we made a 20-minute film which was with soundscape and interview recordings, which was projected on the cliffs, and several hundred residents came to experience this, and we repeated this event several times. Beginning with a photograph from an institutional archive, so there's a whole story that will be will unfold in the next couple of minutes that began with just one image. In 2013, I was invited by my former MA supervisor, Professor Adrienne Chambon, to apply for funding for a joint cross-institution, cross-discipline project, which was called From Streets to Playgrounds, which activated archives as a dialogical encounter. The whole project was quite literally inspired by just the photograph you see on the left-hand side. It was taken by Arthur Goss in 1912. It was a government-commissioned job. He had been tasked to make photographs of the neighborhood, the ward in Toronto, because this entire neighborhood, which was Toronto's first working-class neighborhood, had been earmarked for demolition. The accidental capture of children playing in the street and their sense of agency and autonomy, even though the photograph had not been intended to foreground these children, led us to explore other sets of archival images where children had featured as incidental subjects, but with a level of personal autonomy. Our colleagues Fit and Mary also took a reenactment photograph in the same location where Gossett made the original photograph using young Torontonians who enjoyed posing in the same spot where Arthur Gossett made his original photograph. This process, as I mentioned, led us into looking at other cities that went through similar processes of neighborhood clearance in the first part of the 20th century. And I even discovered that photographs taken in Brighton in the 1930s for slum clearance purposes also featured children in prominent locations, but they'd also been taken for surveying purposes, not because people wanted to document the children. They were there to show this is the area, this is going to be cleared, this is where the architects can then use these as a starting point. So the strand of the project spun into a series of projection events and exhibitions at the main Jubilee Library and also across the city. Here, the building you can see in this photograph here was an old board school, and for many years was the home for our BA photography course at Brighton. Sadly, it was demolished shortly after we hosted this event here. And that was a building from the originally from the 1830s, parts of it from the 1850s, and sadly, like these photographs and like the like the locations depicted in the photographs, it's not there anymore. But through um through working on this project and through a lucky coincidence, around this time, I met Marilyn Stafford, the photographer Marilyn Stafford, at Shore and Wordfest, where she was giving a talk about her life in photography. I was particularly drawn to a group of schoolboys, a photograph of a group of schoolboys who were laughing and helping each other climbing up a wall. I then learned that she was a retired professional photographer. She was born in 1926, who had moved from the US to Paris only a few years after the end of World War II. While in Paris, in the late 40s and early 50s, and as often as possible, Marilyn would step out with her RoliFlex camera and venture off by bus to discover new parts of the city, looking to take Candid Street photographs. On one of these days, she found herself in the Bastille area, where she went down a narrow alleyway, which then led her into the Cite Lesage Boulogne, a small enclosed working-class neighborhood. There she met lots of children playing and posing for her. Unfortunately, many of the negatives made that day were lost when later on a removal company mislaid some of her moving boxes. But eight contact sheets and a small number of negatives and vintage prints survived. These are precious surviving fragments of an underrepresented neighborhood that itself was demolished in 1961, leading to the dispersal of residents to high-rise buildings on the suburbs of Paris within less than a decade of Marilyn's chance visit. Seventy years later, Marilyn gave me permission to reshare her photographs as part of the wider Canadian project. And during 2017, I curated an exhibition of her photographs in the Pierre Leon gallery in Toronto, where we enlarged the contact sheets prints and single images and made very large AO prints out of these little fragments of contact sheets. This exhibition received much publicity and coverage at the time, especially in the francophone media, where the leading newspaper covered the exhibition under a title that underlined its significance. They said, so that the children of Paris after the war or the post-war period are no longer invisible or no longer remain invisible, which had been our intention to bring these children's experiences back into the public sphere. We also made extensive use of social media and Instagram as platforms to send, receive, and recirculate some of these photographs, and this led to being contacted via Instagram by a former resident of the cité, Alain Dupont, who offered us illuminating commentary. Alain was born in the Cite Lesage in 1947 and started responding. He wrote initially about Meriden's photographs, and he also sent photographs from his own family album and that of a friend. He also confirmed the exact locations of Merlin's photographs within the Cité on a map from 1959, which I had reprinted in the exhibition catalogue. Over time, more residents got in touch to share their stories and documents, and this all helped us to broaden the storyline, identify and name some of the children and adults in Marilyn's photographs and bring them in a way back to life or back into circulation. But really, the most moving encounter occurred in 2020 when Marilyn met Alain online as part of a symposium hosted by the Sorbonne in Paris, which I had co-organized to coincide with an online exhibition of her work. It was going to be in Paris, but it was the pandemic, so we had to move everything online at the time. Alain had the opportunity to personally tell Marilyn how important her photographs were for him, and Marilyn shared her delight and responded that it meant so much to her that her photographs held so much meaning for Alain and also for all the other people who had personal connections to the cite. She said that photography of photographs should not just be dead items, a thing that one collects and sticks on the wall. I love the feeling that it has a relevance and a personal sense. And for this reason, I'm just delighted that these children are coming back to life for me, for them, and for their families. With the support of the director of the organization Photo Document in Brighton, Nina Emmett, Marilyn set up an annual photo reportage award which supports professional female documentary photographers worldwide. And I would greatly encourage you all to also look at the monograph Merilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography, which was published in 2021 and edited by Nina and Merlin's daughter, Lina. The final story I want to share features photographs made by the Emigray photographer Wolf Sushitsky, whose international career in film and photography spanned 70 years. I'd first met Wolf in 2001 when I interviewed him for a book project, and we remained friends until his death in 2016 at the age of 104. Over the years, I had written about his work extensively, but I was unaware that in 1959 he had been commissioned to take photographs of the first nine British New Towns, including Crawley, within 10 years of their initial construction. It wasn't until I did a research residency at Fotohof Salzburg in 2022, Fotorhof now holds most of his photographic archive, and I came across several large contact sheet books there, which were filled with beautiful contact sheet images of all of the nine British Newtowns, including Harlow and Basildon. Fothoff's remit is to encourage a living archive. Through working with museums and educational institutions, they support the use of archival photographs for creative and cultural engagement. So when I suggested that we try to return some of these photographs back to the places where Wolf had taken them, they were happy to scan in as many of the contact sheet images as would be needed. With the help of a small HRC night grant and supported by Fotohof, town planning colleague Georgia Wrighton and Crawley Museums Joe and Mick, I put on an exhibition of Wolf's Crawley Newtown photographs at Crawley Museum last year. This exhibition attracted 3,000 visitors from diverse ages and backgrounds, the largest visitor number for any of the exhibitions at the museum thus far. Museum staff and volunteers hosted many school visits, a community engagement workshop and gallery tours. Local resident Ian Jenkins came to see the exhibition on the very first day it opened. And we couldn't believe when he, and and and we and he couldn't believe it, when he recognized his aunt Margaret in the main exhibition photograph taken in the Tilgate neighborhood. She's the lady eating an ice lolly. And that made him then realize that he would have to be the baby in the Pram. Sixty-five years had passed, and Ian told us that his parents had moved to Crawley in the late 1950s so that his father could work on the Manor Royal Industrial Estate as an aircraft engineer. Ian came to many of the events we hosted and also helped us add further context to some of Vol's photographs. Over the course of the exhibition, other visitors also recognized parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. The Crawley Writers Group responded to the photographs through poetry and short stories. Kev Nylan noticed in his piece, which he wrote in response to Vols' photograph of Queen's Square in Crawley, how much has changed from the not very distant past. Sixty years is no time at all in a four billion-year history of the planet. I sit at the edge of Queen Square with what was once the Queensway Department Store looming over my left shoulder, now being underutilized as decathlon. The people passing are dressed so differently from that time, and now no vehicles get near the square. It makes me think, who's documenting this town today? Will those photographs be available for future generations to stand and inspect? When we're in 2091, who will have been this year's Walsuschitzki? That question was partially later answered by great connections we made at the museum, where two professional Crawley-based photographers, Jeff Pitcher and Wally, responded to that call, and they continue to make photographs of present-day Crawley. This brings me to the end and the return to Joe Spence and the Joe Spence Archive. I hope that I've inspired you to go through your own attics, look under your beds, look in you at your own maybe dusty or not dusty family albums, and begin also to look out for so-called orphaned images and begin to explore the opportunities for visual storytelling and reconnecting the past with the present. As you've seen, engaging in photography projects can lead to incredible insights for participants, a renewed sense of self, solidarity, connection, and agency. Some of the projects discussed here have had cathartic outcomes. Many have led on to further photography, writing, or film projects. I hope that by opening up archives for new audiences and drawing on the material's responsive potential, photographs can be understood as an ever-evolving memory practice rather than a closed record. Or as the photo historian Elizabeth Edward observes, photographs collide, spill, jolt, and swirl in ever-shifting sets of relations, constituting and reconstituting the past and its relationship with the present. So you might remember I began by talking about Joe Spence and how important putting myself in the picture was for me. Indeed, I think that discovering putting myself in the picture made me want to take up photography. So my first encounter with the work was 30 years ago. I then met her former partner and longtime collaborator, Terry Dennett, at the first Canadian Joe Spence retrospective, which was around the time I discovered putting myself in the picture. Terry became a friend, and when I moved to England in 1998 from Toronto, and over time, he invited me to his flat where he was the curator of the Joe Spence Memorial Archive and also entrusted me with some of his own archival material with tapes, documents, and books. Some of these have just fed into a trilogy of new publications, foregrounding the work of Joe Spence and Terry Dennett, which I was the series advisory editor for. The trilogy was published by museums, etc. All these photographs and stories shared contribute to a collective and cultural archive that can be opened up again and again in the future, and I hope will have relevance for some of you and many people elsewhere. So I look forward to your questions, but before that, I would just like to put up this list of acknowledgments. Of this is not exclusive, this just lists some names. There are many people here, too numerous to name them all here. But special thanks to the people on this slide and everyone who's collaborated and participated. There's a selected reference list, which I believe you will be getting as a handout if you'd like at the end of the talk. Thank you for your time, and I really look forward to your questions.