Home Is a Person/ L8: The World Lived Here

CULTURE SHIFTS #4

Home Is a Person & The World Lived Here: L8 Andrew Jackson / Darryl Georgiou / Rebekah Tolley Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust

Welcome to the Culture Shifts brochure series Culture Shifts is a socially engaged photography programme, working with 11 national and international photographers embedded in communities across 7 areas of Liverpool City Region. The project seeks to support communities to explore their stories in a way that is meaningful to them.

graphic image, and look at the various strands of collaborative practice each photographer and the medium itself can bring to the work. What happens when we move away from the voice of a single image-maker to that of the collective voice, co-creating, co-narrating and co-curating their own photo story?

Collaborating with photographers, communities have co-authored a series of photo stories: sequences of images that reflect on their identity, interests and lives. Collectively we hope these photo stories will inspire, surprise or challenge people, through exhibitions, an open online platform (www.photostories.org.uk) and within each of our specially designed Culture Shifts brochures.

Through Culture Shifts, photographers and communities have come together to curate their own messages and broadcast them in a way that is inclusive, collaborative and representative. This is the foundation of socially engaged photography. We are delighted to share both the outcomes and the process of each photographer and community.

A collaboration between the residents of Granby/ Toxteth, and artists Andrew Jackson, Darryl Georgiou and Rebekah Tolley

Together, as communities, commissioners and photographers, we aim to explore the role of photography as a tool for expression and a platform to challenge stereotypes of localised identities. Each community collaborated with a different photographer, and although throughout the course of the programme some themes emerged time and time again, each project was distinct in its approach to working and in the final work created.

Culture Shifts has only been made possible through the collaborative approach to partnership commissioning and delivery and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the local authority venues, cultural, community and health sector partners across the region who made the project a reality. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our core funders for the programme, Arts Council England, for our strategic touring funding support.

This project looks at the process of how people living in an area alongside each other become a resilient community.

It began as just a short term residency, a collaboration between Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust and artists Andrew Jackson, Darryl Georgiou and Rebekah Tolley. But it has since developed into two distinct and powerful reflections upon what makes a neighbourhood become a home: Home is a Person and L8: The World Lived Here.

Culture Shifts aimed to challenge questions around authorship in the photo-

Culture Shifts Creative Producer Liz Wewiora

Granby is an area in Toxteth (known locally by its postcode, L8), a part of

CULTURE SHIFTS #4

Home Is a Person & The World Lived Here: L8

Liverpool that is no stranger to publicity. In the 1980s the area was associated with the infamous Toxteth uprisings.

It has faced decades of housing demolition projects, upheaving communities in and out of the area. In more recent years, it has been known for its for community-led urban regeneration and social housing scheme Granby Four Streets CLT, and associated Turner Prize winning project with art and architecture collective Assemble.

Working with people from the area, the artists wanted to look beyond the various narratives that the media have woven around the area, and find out what really makes up the residents and history of Granby.

Home is a Person Home is a Person seeks to shed some light on the broad spectrum of people that make up the streets of Granby today. The project is composed of intimate portraits of the community alongside landscape shots of spaces in the area, both private and public.

To produce the work, Andrew Jackson worked in close collaboration with Michelle Walker, who lives in the area and knows it Lathkill Dale well. Together, they visited the houses of the people that make up the streets of Granby Four Streets CLT. Michelle helped Andrew get to know local residents before photographing them, allowing him to capture honest, collaboratively made portraits in settings that meant something to the people involved.

The images produced reflect the generations of families who have moved, left and returned to the area. They are a testament to the rich cultural diversity of people who make Granby such a vibrant community to be a part of.

Andrew sees this as an initial attempt to work collaboratively with the community and is hoping to connect further in the near future.

Home It’s a simple word that means everything.

course, are irretrievably interlinked now.

It is difficult, to not consider this when To the extent that some will live for it whilst we reflect upon the horrors of Grenfell others will die for it.

Towers, or preface this disaster within any work which now deals with social housing Home; that place which shapes and from this point onwards. defines us. Which gives us comfort and makes us whole, to the degree that with- As the horrors from that night point to out it, we can feel that we are nothing - the ways in which at times social housing homeless. has been used to ‘cleanse’ or ‘engineer’ communities or to ‘cut corners’ by a sucHome is warmth, it is stability, safety; cession of governments, on the quality of home is a person. housing it has provided its people.

It’s nearly one hundred years since Lloyd George’s 1919 “Homes fit for heroes” campaign brought social housing to the forefront of British politics. One hundred years that has seen housing become a political ‘football’ like no other subject other than immigration. But the two issues, of

In this light, Grenfell Towers has become the legacy of that 1919 campaign. Yet, if we are to find any positives from this disaster it is that the people’s voices are now being heard.

Andrew Jackson

The World Lived Here: L8 How does the presentation of the past shape our understanding of the present?

This is a question relevant to everyone in one way or another, but particularly for people living around Granby, an area that is still, in many ways, dealing with the fallout of the ‘81 unrest: an event that some refer to as the riots and others as the uprisings.

Since Darryl Georgiou and Rebekah Tolley’s first site visit to Granby, they became focused on creating images that capture the prevailing atmosphere of the area. To do this, they responded to residents’ thoughts, memories, archive photographs and the streets themselves.

The work looks at the past through the lens of the here and now. It involves events, locations and people, all of which present competing narratives of how the area came to be what it is today and what it went through on the way.

One recurring theme is the subject of ‘how places feel’ (also known as genius loci, the prevailing character of a place).

This feeling is, of course, different for

different people. To encompass this, they adopted a collaborative or socially engaged approach to photography; constructing imagery with people that attempts to engage with and honestly represent the people featured in the work.

Darryl Georgiou was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, B21 and as a young adult witnessed the uprisings of 1981 and 1985.

Coming to Liverpool L8 felt strangely reminiscent of ‘home’. Rebekah Tolley spent time in Toxteth after the 1985 disturbances and subsequently worked in Liverpool.

All of the artists would like to thank all of our collaborators for their support during the residency and have plans to continue working with the community and Granby Four Streets CLT on various developments, including the Granby Winter Garden and artist’s studio. Andrew would like to pay particular thanks to resident Michelle Walker for her integral support in creating a platform for participation of community members in his portrait series.

“Whilst editing our pictures late at night, breaking television news showed a block of flats on fire.

Inner cities and their most vulnerable citizens are too often neglected. Any community has to feel safe to thrive. We can hopefully learn from the past and our project aims to explore this possibility�

Darryl Georgiou and Rebekah Tolley

Photostories

“4 billion photographs per day are uploaded onto social media.

Photography is now as important as text or verbal communication in the stories we tell about our lives.”

Sarah Fisher, Executive Director, Open Eye Gallery

Culture Shifts doesn’t end here. Contributing to the project is open to all through PhotoStories, our new online showcasing platform: photostories.org.uk.

Photostories showcases the result of our Culture Shifts collaborative photography projects, but the platform is also open to anyone. There are resources on the site to help you think about the way you capture, select and curate your own digital exhibition of images.

Everyone is invited to upload photo stories - sequences of photos - that reflect on the people, places and communities that make up your experience of the world.

More and more, we are using photography to communicate to each other. But just like verbal or written language, we must use photography to communicate responsibly and effectively. To join in, get a free PhotoStories account. photostories.org.uk

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