It was good to put my work out there in the social research world and spend time talking to people about what they got from it. I find there is a sense of vulnerability in physically spending time alongside your work and encouraging people to engage with it. Putting something on the wall and running away has its advantages! It was useful to have just done the collective piece for the Linear space at UCA as it made me think about the background and making little titles to help contextualise the work.
We had put notices by the books to encourage people to touch the more robust books but interestingly people were still reticent to do so – we seem to be trained to look but not touch! It did, however, prove to be a good way to spark conversation though as I was able to encourage people to pick them up and that usually sparked some questions about the work.
I had some great conversations about people’s relationships with their own family photography and how important the photographs were. They were fascinated by the Ebay found photographs and we talked about missing narratives and how it was hard not to look at them and see if we could see people we recognised.
One lovely delegate talked at length about how the evening before she had been sitting with her mother and daughter last night talking about their family tree and going through old photographs. She talked about how uncanny it was to then come to the conference and see all these photos. In building her family tree she was creating a set of thumbnails and wanted them all to show the individual family member as a young child so her own daughter could relate to them. She felt images of an old Edwardian woman wouldn’t create enough of a connection.
I haven’t done the SRA conference before and I’m glad I decided to put some work forward, not least because I have now experimented with four new book forms. Lots of ideas for the future and hopefully these books will get further use. I also want to thank the SRA team who were incredibly helpful and very sensitive to creating the right environment for a pop up style gallery.
Development of this work can be seen on the Projects page.