action-research

Slightly off tangent to this project blog, but related in a way to my interest in public spaces and in the exploration of the everyday, mundane aspects of our lives is an exhibition at Poole Lighthouse – Landscape and Industry.

It Opens tomorrow, Fri 15th on 3rd floor at Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts, Kingland Road, Poole, Dorset BH15 1UG.

This exhibition aims to documents our working environment; photographs that show the traces of histories, the remains of old infrastructures and the development of new ones. Local photography club the Happy Snappers have worked with artist Joe Stevens. Together they have been working on an oral history project called “Our working Lives’. We have been talking to local residents about their early working lives, covering; the jobs they did, how they found work, and the career advice they received. We have been working with Poole Museum on this and it was interesting to see the lack of records in their photography archive on people at work and the places where they worked. They have a lot on the Mayors, official functions and the scenic places, but not so much on the everyday landscape that we travel through; the trading estates; the shops and its commercial panorama.

The Happy Snappers are an informal photography group run by and for older people living in Poole. They support each other to take better photos and to keep fit and healthy by being physically, mentally and socially active.

Included in the exhibition is street photographer Paul Russell, who is profiled in Thames & Hudson’s ‘Street Photography Now’ book [http://tinyurl.com/2wushuz]. His work is also being shown in the ‘London Street Photography 1860-2010’ exhibition at the Museum of London [http://tinyurl.com/5vpjw2g].

Alongside these new works we will be exploring archival record photographs that document Poole’s working landscape; its trading estates; the shops and its commercial panorama. These spaces are ones you simply drive through, that when you pause to recall it, leaves little or no lasting impression; that passes as if in a blur.

Day two tomorrow when the second half of the year group (150 children) go out onto Dartmoor to investigate the landscape and decided if it is a ‘theme park’, or wilderness.

There has been an interesting resistance for people to regard places like Dartmoor as a ‘theme park’. Even though i have found it to be a completely managed landscape. But still don’t want to influence the young people in their decisions.

We are changing the day a little after consideration to the last outing. The activities on the tor went very well, so we’ll keep those the same. But later when they are back at school reflecting on their experiences, we will adapt a couple of the tasks. There was a bit of a issue downloaded all the photos for them to edit and label (they were asked to select just six photos that summed up the area and caption them). This time we will use the previous set of photos, so they will already be on the system ready for teachers to use. Secondly the writing and mapping tasks will be broken down and spelt out in more detail for teachers to follow. Surprisingly some teachers had a little difficulty understanding what precisely to do with these tasks (students were asked to draw a map of where they’d visited and then to sum up the area in twelve words or less). I think it was basically down to how we tend to complicate things, that they thought there was more to it then there was.