A pretty great week of research and meetings.
Had a lovely afternoon on Wednesday with Bradford based ethnographer and writer Irna Qureshi, (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/irna-qureshi) a very interesting and generous person who is always happy to share information and conversation. Earlier in the year I went to the closing event for a project she was involved with under the Connected Communities programme (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Resear…) The project was a collaboration between herself, Leeds based historian William Gould http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/people/20030/faculty_o… and Sheffield based ethnographer Kate Pahl http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/staff/academi… in which they worked with a Pakistani family from Rotherham. Irna had worked closely with one memberof the the family, M, to uncover personal stories and family history. M, who attended the event, talked eloquently about the process of working with Irna, and how it had transformed her perceptions of her late father by discovering his early life through looking at his passport and other significant objects. This, she said had helped bring the family closer. Since going to this event, I have been thinking about this, which was evidently a powerful experience for M, and wondering how photographs might be able to be used in a similiar way.
Irna very kindly picked me up from the station in Bingley and fed me a delicious lunch (her mum’s dahl recipe – yum) and we had a few hours of talking around her enthography practice and also her own family album, which she very kindly shared with me. Irna has a very interesting role in relation to the production and archiving of her family photographs, which I will write about in a future post.
Then, on Thursday, a meeting with artist Caroline Hick and Jez Coram, in Caroline’s beautiful garden at her house in Leeds. We were meeting to explore how Jez and Caroline as ‘For The Love of the People’ collaboration, might work with me on the family photography project. As a starting point, we shared some photographs from each of our own personal archives under single sex groupings. This process of sharing was a powerful and bonding experience. As with looking at Irna’s album, there is a sense of intimacy, and also trust in looking at someone else’s family photographs. I’m still processing much of what we talked about, but we have arranged to meet again in a fortnight to develop our conversation further. It feels like a really organic exchange, with so many possibilities. The vibe with Carline and Jez is exploratory, open, trusting, playful. I’m really really happy to be working with them as part of the project.
Also been doing quite a bit of reading this week. I’m thinking abut different ways of documenting my research, as I think it’s interesting to trace (and attribute) the processes of my learning.
I’ve been experimenting with using Storify as a platform for some of my conversations, and thought it might be interesting way to try to present my research. What do you think?
http://storify.com/JeanMcEwan/family-photography-p…
