In the context of the North East Photography Network's forthcoming festival ‘The Social: Encountering Photography’, Inheritance Projects will convene a symposium attending to the cultural legacy of the British photography practices, organisations and collectives who aligned themselves with left political movements throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
The event responds to the issues that Terry Dennett and Jo Spence characterised in their 1986 account of the Photography Workshop:
"One of the ironies of the Left and women’s movement must surely be this: that groups which are set up and do innovative work usually split into differing political segments; these segments then go on and found new dynasties, or just fade away. In time, the original differences, cracks, fissures and explosions come to be neatly laundered over, erased from the memory of those involved because they are too painful, not fully known to those who came later because ‘nobody told us about it’ and, finally, mythologised through the accounts of others writing about them from the outside."
The event will bring together various researchers who are attempting to do photo-history ‘from the outside’ in order to share methodological approaches with a focus on the histories of regional as well as London based practices.
8 November 2013, 1.30 - 5pm
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
£10/5 Booking essential
Participants include Louise Shelley, Participatory Projects Co-ordinator at The Showroom, Noni Stacey, PhD candiate at London College of Communication and Dr. Matthew Hearn, Independent Curator and Researcher.
