The aim of the Ashington District Star project was “to inspire a new group of photographers and artists, of all ages and abilities, to look at Ashington today and creatively document the area and its community.” (Evaluation Report, 2015). Ashington is one of the largest towns in Northumberland and developed around its pit which opened in 1867 and closed in 1988.
The project took its inspiration from The Pitman Painters or, more usually, the Ashington Group that had originated in a Workers Educational Association art appreciation class in 1934. The class was largely made up of local miners (‘Pitmen’) who as part of the ‘learning by doing’ approach encouraged by Robert Lyon, their tutor, started to paint scenes from their everyday lives for later critique, in class. In 1936, the class constituted itself as a Group and held its first exhibition in the Hatton Gallery, Armstrong College, Newcastle. Over 80 of the Group’s paintings are on permanent exhibition at the Woodhorn Museum, in Ashington.
The Ashington District Star project, which ran in 2014-15, was led by Julian Germain and an ‘editorial team’ of around 15 local people as well as students from Northumberland College. Initially, the intention was to produce two newspapers, recreating photographically some of the original Ashington Group paintings but in contemporary terms. In the event, four editions of the newspaper were produced each of which featured an original Pitman painting but all of which took on and extended the commitment to capturing everyday life in Ashington. The newspapers do not credit the images, reflecting the community and team focus of the project.
According to Germaine, collaboration was key to the project and “the reason that the Ashington District Star came into existence, [was] as a vehicle for connecting and collaborating with local people in the entire artistic process, from creation through to display and discourse about their community.” (Culture Matters, created 5th March 2016). That is not to say that the collaborations involved in delivering this project were without their challenges. Even with the institutional support of bait, an arts facilitation project and a bridge to funders operating in South East Northumberland as well as the Woodhorn Museum, the process of engaging local people (with perhaps more negative views of the area and less familiarity with its artistic heritage) met with the usual difficulties of inadequate resources to sustain involvement, perceived elitism and the ‘observer effect’, especially in relation to the recording of ‘informal’ conversations.
The degree of engagement achieved by the project was helped by the choice of a newspaper as the principal form of output. According to the formal evaluation of the project;
“The newspaper format enabled local people to engage with the project and generated better quality outcomes than would have been possible if moving straight to an exhibition. The format also enabled the project to take art direct to the local community by distributing copies on the street and in community venues. … The newspaper format of the project output offers a familiarity which removes barriers to engaging with the arts. The distribution of a free newspaper in the heart of Ashington enabled the project to access the public directly and address barriers to engagement more effectively than traditional marketing activity.”
A number of the images (reproduced below from unedited camera phone shots to preserve the immediacy and ‘disposability’ of the newspaper) directly conduct, in Germaine’s words, “a dialogue between the past and present as well as between the nature of photography and painting” (Culture Matters):
The sense of continuity and change that is expressed in these images speaks both to the progress and the stagnation of working class lifestyles; to solidarity and to the continuance of structural disadvantage.
However, as Germaine explains directly (see below), the project also wanted to capture the new and the future of Ashington. Hence, young people feature prominently;
Germaine provides his own introduction to the project here:
The images reproduced in the Star are true to the legacy they seek to inherit. They are striking in their ordinariness. They are in and of a specific community at a given time in its history and they give shape to an experience that might otherwise have gone unobserved and unconsidered. Most importantly to me, they are images made for and made accessible to the community itself. For now at least, the project is honest in so far as it does not seek to sensationalise or sentimentalise the time and the place it documents. The images are, in many cases technically sophisticated and beautifully (and artfully) composed but they are also unassuming, sympathetic and generate a form of ‘we feeling’ that so much documentary photography struggles to achieve, especially when shot with overt socio-political intent, when angst-ridden or as part of some other proselytizing agenda. Once the images appear as gallery pieces, remote from their context, who knows?
The Star project shaped my understanding of the much more modest project that I am currently undertaking, especially in relation to the choice of primary output. I am much more limited in my ambitions as I am much more limited by my resources, especially of time. I am documenting my experience of engaging with a small section of a particular community on a very specific brief (an account of which will appear below). The challenges of collaboration and engagement are very similar and negotiations continue about the final output, which will be far less of a photojournal than is the Star. However, it will seek to meet Germaine’s quite proper stricture that, “to make good documentary photography or film, you must of course deal with the people who are your subject. At the very least their agreement is required.” (Culture Matters).
It will also result in the production of a newspaper, with a heavier text content in this instance. The newspaper format has been chosen for the same reasons that contributed to the success of the Star project; it is accessible, relatively cheap to produce; it is a familiar form of communication ( and so dissemination) to the community in which it will be distributed; it has ‘democratic’ associations (rather than elitist ones). It is also signaletic (Sandbye, 2012), reflecting am understanding of documentary as a ‘social everyday activity [rather] than a memory-embalming activity, creating presence, relational situations, and communication’ (Sandbye, 2012 p.2) and it is this form of documentary that I wish to pursue.
Reference:
Sandbye, M. (2012) ‘It has not been—it is. The signaletic transformation of photography’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 4:1, 18159,
This piece is brilliant! You write as if you have been writing about documentary photography for decades not months. Of course you have been writing about people, communities and politics for decades. This piece is engaging, accessible and informative. And makes one excited to see the forthcoming newspaper project…