New Londoners (2006 - 2008)
Keywords: Refugee, Young People
Project Background
Funding Partners: The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, The City Parochial Foundation, The Jack Petchey Foundation
Project Partner: Project Dost
Project Managers:Tiffany Fairey and Liz Orton
PhotoVoice Facilitators: Lucy Williams and Lydia Martin
New Londoners is a partnership project between PhotoVoice and Dost, which aims to help young separated refugees settle and integrate into the UK.
Through the project, 15 New Londoners have been mentored by 15 emerging and established London photographers to create personalised photo stories about their views and experiences of London. The work is being published as a collection of photo essays - New Londoners: Reflections on Home - by award-winning publishers, Trolley. It also has contributions by the BBC journalist George Alagiah, by the award-winning author Hari Kunzru; and by the curator Charlotte Cotton.
Project photo gallery
Press
The Guardian Online
BBC Online
Further project info
New Londoners: Project update and analysis
Liz Orton, May 2008
“It can’t be over, there’s still space on my memory card!” was one participant’s reaction when she found out that the digital photography project was coming to a close. It’s a comment that’s stayed with me because it epitomises the enthusiasm for digital photography that so many young people show. It also illustrates how hard it is sometimes when a project has to draw to a close, and how important it is to find follow-up strategies.
The latest phase of PhotoVoice’s Moving Lives project with young unaccompanied refugees in East London is a mentoring scheme, called New Londoners. It began last summer when 15 young refugees were partnered with 15 emerging and successful London photographers. The young people, aged 16 to 23, come from 10 different countries, with diverse experiences and backgrounds. Some had been in the UK for just a few months when they joined the project, others for as long as six years. They had all been participants on previous PhotoVoice projects and were selected as mentees because of their potential as young photographers. PhotoVoice had worked in this way before – partnering individual participants with photographers – but never for long periods of time, infact never usually for longer than a day or two. More commonly, PhotoVoice works in workshop contexts, with a few facilitators and a large group of young people of up to 15 participants.
The role of the mentor was to support, affirm, advise, enthuse and encourage the mentee and ultimately to enable them to reach their full photographic potential. The mentors helped nurture the mentee’s confidence in their own photographic ideas, and bring those ideas to life. They typically met together about once a fortnight, went to exhibitions, met for cups of tea and juice, talked about the stuff of life, and reviewed the mentee’s latest photographs.
The main focus of the mentoring relationship was the production of a creative body of work by the young person. The mentors and mentees worked together for around four months. The mentees would mostly take the pictures while on their own, and the mentor would give regular feedback and suggestions. Some of the relationships terminated, as planned, at the end of last year, and others continue to this day.
The possibilities and opportunities created by the one-to-one aspect of mentoring are immense but like all relationships it requires commitment from both sides and carries risks. For PhotoVoice – as well as for the participants and mentors - it has been a rich learning experience. What has been so exciting, has been watching the young people’s confidence in their own abilities flourish. Some of the key challenges have revolved around the capacity of both parties to consistently commit to meeting up. Freelance photographers have unpredictable schedules, and many of the new arrivals, aside from the fact that they are typically teenage, so often had meetings with solicitors, social workers or support workers at short notice. We found that the mentors needed more support than we had planned for, and PhotoVoice is currently looking at the question of how it can find the means and the capacity to provide better ongoing support not just for mentors on Moving Lives but for all its project facilitators.
The ‘creative brief’ for the mentees was a relatively open one: to make a body of photographic work and writing on any aspect of the theme of New Londoners. One or two of the participants were able to fix on a subject relatively quickly and easily. For the majority, finding their photographic voice was not such a smooth process - one of simply choosing a subject and shooting, or deciding what they wanted to communicate - but a case of exploring with the camera. (It should be born in mind that most of the mentees did not get involved in the project because they had some message they wanted to get out to the rest of the world or had grand dreams of realising a particular photographic project for publication; but because they of the opportunity to have a mentor and because they like taking photographs).
So initially – and more especially for the newer arrivals – embarking on the creative process was quite difficult. But as so often happens, this early uncertainty gave rise to great things. They photographed the things immediately around them, the details of the everyday, small observations, things that appealed to them or were important to them. The images are good but what makes them special as a body of work is our understanding of why they were taken. Put together with words, the images take on a much more significant meaning. The pictures are linked not by any obvious documentary narrative – so it’s not possible to say that they are about one particular thing or another - but by intentions of the young photographer. The images become part of the ongoing conversation they are having with their new home, as they learn to live and settle in London. Hence viewers, through their images and words understand something more not just of New Londoners but of London itself.
It is difficult to make generalisations, but the value the participants derived from the project were shaped by how long they had been in the UK, and, related to that, how old they were and how much prior experience they had of taking photographs. For the newer arrivals, the project was very much about supporting integration: helping them to get to know London, widening their experience of using public transport, being in supportive relationship with an adult who knows London, being actively engaged in learning a new skill, feeling valued and respected as a person, having a means of expression for feelings and ideas. For the older participants - who are more settled and now in employment or full time study - the value of the project derived more from improving vocational skills, and professional development; deepening existing ties with PhotoVoice; and creative achievement and enjoyment.
Photography as a tool for integration of young refugees
Photography is full of potential as a creative aid in the process of integration. At its simplest, it’s an accessible tool for self-expression: it can be quickly learned and it’s not difficult for newcomers to take decent pictures. A young refugee - new to the UK - who might be lacking confidence, and speak little English, can quite easily and quickly master a basic digital camera. Digital photography gives instant results, and requires no formal training to become a tool for communication, observation and creativity.
At first all the young refugees we work with – like all young people – love, above all else, taking pictures of each other. They take instantly to the idea of ‘posing’ for the camera. Both the photographer and the subject quickly get involved in directing and giving instructions to each other. Taking these portraits of each other becomes a step in building peer relationships and in creating a sense of immediate community.
The young people also quickly turn the camera on themselves and, looking at their self-portraits over time, it is possible to see how they form a kind of visual autobiography. These self-representations are about performance and fantasy, idealisation, experimentation, humour and identity. They act out different roles: Bollywood film star, hoodie, pop star, fighter, athlete, sports star, hard-working student etc. In a sense, photography is not just a reflection of the process of creating new and multiple identities - it is a very part of the process.
Photographs, of course, create instant and permanent records. Nearly all of us do this in different ways in our lives: we create tracks for ourselves through albums, diaries, videos, mementos etc. When you are uprooted from one place to another the need to do this can be even stronger. Photographs can be built into histories and albums that reflect a new life, a new start. Pictures can decorate walls in sparse bedrooms, fill the gaps with new memories and friends, pictures can be sent to families and friends, they can be emailed and sent through mobiles.
Sharafat, one of the New Londoner mentees says, “I like photography because photographs stay forever. 100 years later people will still see them and remember that this person did some good; that this person is still here, still standing.”
At a time when their lives are being defined by ‘official’ records and legal form-filling, photographs provide a way that young refugees can create their own. Evidence that they are in charge of, that they can frame in their own terms. This creation of memories and evidence is really important for many new arrivals. According to another mentee, Feng; “In my photography I want to capture a moment before it is gone. I do not decide what I will photograph, I just see a moment and try and record it.” In looking at the world through a lens, in deciding how to frame what we see, we mark out conscious moments in the endless process of observation. The author Hari Kunzru, who writes an introduction to the New Londoners book says photographs, “are also evidence, proof that the photographer was in a certain place at a certain time, which is another way of saying that these pictures are memories - and when you have memories of a place, you’re beginning to put down roots.”
The camera is a tool to negotiate unfamiliar places. PhotoVoice facilitators take project participants on shoots all around London – along The Southbank, to the City, to Brick Lane, Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, around Westminster. There are always hundreds of almost identical images of the London Eye, but in almost everything else there is uniqueness and creativity. “Taking pictures is a way of establishing that a new life does have a form……. You reach into the churning flow and try to extract something, one thing, which has a shape and a purpose, something which will belong only to you”, writes Hari Kunzru.
Photographs can be a medium to facilitate discussion and dialogue. I will always remember a comment made by a community worker after a participatory photography workshop. “I was totally shocked at how a photograph in a person’s hand would enable someone who finds public speaking impossible, to stand in front of a group and speak confidently about their very personal struggle……”. Photographs can create a distance between the person and the subject, and this depersonalization can help a person who want to talk but might find it difficult.
It is through this discussion and dialogue that photography also allows learning, not just about image-making but about the world around us, and about each other. Young people arriving in London are faced with much that is unfamiliar. Things might be done differently from in their own country. Attitudes and norms are different. Even for the most adaptable of young people, this transition can be unsettling. Looking at and making images, can be part of this process.
I am not trying to make a particular claim for photography over an above any other media or art form, but to explain something of the possible relationships between image-making and social integration. In addition, photography can probably only work in this way if the young person is given adequate and comprehensive support in other areas of their lives. PhotoVoice works in close partnership with Dost which provides emotional, education, advocacy and therapeutic support to young refugees. It is this work which is the bed-rock of meeting new arrivals’ most immediate integration needs.
New Londoners Book
The mentoring part of New Londoners is now finished, though many of the relationships continue more informally. We are working with an independent publisher to bring all the images and writing together in a photography book. In very broad terms the theme of the work is young people in transition: from childhood to adulthood; from dependence to independence; from one place and culture to another. It is a poetic record of fifteen young people negotiating complex ideas about home and place.
The challenge from this point onwards is how to market the book. This will be a familiar challenge for anyone using participatory arts methodologies with excluded communities. A tension – between how the work is made, and how the work is ‘marketed’ – has always characterised PhotoVoice’s work with young refugees in the UK. It is a highly politicised environment, in which the media has been particularly inflammatory. Issues of refugee representation are extremely sensitive.
The young people are acutely aware of the dilemma. One participant explained: “We have had different experiences from other young people and it’s important that other people learn about those experiences, but we don’t want them to make us different.” And another: “I am the same person that I was in my country, my personality is the same, but my circumstances are different.” What should the book be called? If we don’t use the word refugee in the title, how can we describe what it is about and who made the work? How can we challenge old labels without creating new ones? How can we preserve the integrity of the individual voices while also communicating to audiences who they are as a group? How can we ensure the work is judged on its own merit and not because of who made it, as other art is?
The young people we work have repeated their desire to be treated as young people first and refugees second. They want to have the opportunity to represent themselves and their ideas, without fear of judgement or discrimination. PhotoVoice is keen to move beyond the use of personal testimonies about refugees’ past lives: while these offer good creative material for engaging public audiences and building sympathies on an individual level, they haven’t necessarily done much to progress the broader asylum debate. Refugees continued to be understood according to their ‘refugee-ness’ rather than all the other things that make them a person. They become marked by their experiences as a refugee and known for that part of who they are above all others. The media – and the public curiosity it claims to satisfy – has contributed to this problem, by focusing in on ‘pain and suffering’.
Through the book we hope to begin to side-step the traditionally limiting portrayal of refugees and asylum seekers as a group of people defined by their immigration status, and provide a voice to young new Londoners through which they can represent themselves as they want to be seen and heard. Our ambition is to help re-frame the debate about asylum away from fear, hostility and difference and towards commonality and recognition.
We wanted to ensure that the participants in the project understood these dilemmas and were involved in making communications decisions alongside PhotoVoice. We organised a workshop at which we all discussed some of these issues. Participants were very active in discussing the possible use of the word refugee in the book’s title. Only one of them felt happy about the word – “this is who I am and people need to know that I am here as a refugee, it will help them understand”. Others felt uncomfortable about it. “The word refugee is like a judgement for us, people at school will say bad things about us.” They preferred to be the term New Londoners. “It is an open word. It says something about us, about the fact that we have come from other places, but it’s clever because it doesn’t give everything away. It gives our identities a place to hide,“ said one participant.
“It is important that we are involved in making this book. It is a big thing for us. And it’s important that other people should learn about what is going on. Even a great Prime Minister – with great skills – might not know about our situation”, said another participant.
The intended audience for the book is quite carefully and narrowly defined: we want to target politicians, public sector leaders, policy makers and policy influencers, the refugee sector and youth sectors. These are the people who can make a difference to the lives of the participants in their everyday professional decisions and behaviour. The book won’t tell them what to think or what policies or practices to change but we hope it will make them familiar with these young people, not just as refugees, but as young people with different sensibilities, attitudes, ambitions and hopes for their future in the world.
The book will be marketed, not as a refugee book, nor as a charity book, but as an art book with a serious purpose. It is a book about the present, and how the past informs that present. We hope it will sensitise and humanise social and political thought and debate around immigration and asylum. Through it people will see a different side of London, through new eyes. We hope the book will succeed in engaging, stimulating and surprising audiences; creating interest, ideas and debate.