U-Turn - Change the Picture, London
Photography at U-Turn’s Women’s Centre
Change the Picture is a participatory photography and self advocacy project for young female sex workers in East London. Built on a strong partnership between two pioneering charities, Change the Picture works through an innovative new women’s centre in Bethnal Green. Weekly photography workshops allow this vulnerable and stigmatised group of the women a secure and safe space through which they are able to express themselves and find time to reflect upon their lives. Trained photography facilitators are working in close collaboration with a psychotherapist to deliver creative and specifically designed workshops for up to 30 women over the course of a year.
Click here to read a Guardian article about the work of U-Turn and the PhotoVoice project.
Click here to view advocacy postcards.
With the women’s consent, their photographic work will be used to raise awareness of a ‘hidden’ issue and its underlying causes. Their work will shed light on the women’s needs and views, will heighten public awareness and, where possible, will feed into government papers and policy. Alongside the workshops research will be conducted to assess the impact and potential of photography as a therapeutic tool. The findings of this research will be distributed with information and tools about participatory photography to practitioners and organisations working with vulnerable groups.
The aims of Change the Picture are:
- To enable the women to enjoy and express themselves and work through difficulties they face through using photography as a therapeutic tool within a safe and secure environment
- To enable the women to gain confidence in their own voices and their place within society and to be empowered to speak out about their lives, needs and the issues they face
- To enable the women to learn new creative, digital and IT skills
- To create a participatory photography workshop model for working with vulnerable and abused groups
- To research the impact and potential of photography as a therapeutic tool with vulnerable and abused women
- To distribute the research findings and workshop model within in a document that will raise awareness of photography as a therapeutic tool and encourage good practice.
- To create a body of photographic work that can be used to educate public audiences on the experiences of female sex workers in London, highlighting the obstacles faced by these vulnerable women.
For further information please contact:
April Coetzee
april@photovoice.org
020 703 3878