Throughout the length of this project, I have been volunteering with Art Matters, a local community arts project that runs as part of the Richmond Fellowship. The service is designed to help the service users, who can self-refer to the service, to explore artistic mediums as a form of therapeutic exercise. I’ve worked with the project in the past, offering photographic services at some of their annual events, and so was asked to work with the studio manager, fellow photographer and friend Mark Cremmen, to develop and deliver a new set of workshop designed at introducing 35mm film photography to groups of service users, this turned out to be very successful and as a result a new camera club has been formed from members of the workshops who wanted to continue to explore the medium and practice of photography.
As part of my last session there, I had brought along my book to show Mark as he’d been keen to see how my project turned out after discussing it regularly throughout the year’s workshops. This session was the last in the current run and focussed on the scanning and printing of the groups negatives, given the time involved in that process the members who aren’t scanning their work with us usually chat and might discuss their work or might read some photography books we put out, given I had my book with me I decided to put mine out with the others for them to read.
At the end of the session I spoke with some of the people who had read my book to see what they thought of it and to see if the differences in reading between neurodiverse and neurotypical individuals still held up.
Some of the feedback I received was as follows…
· The construction of the images and the blending/layering process created a strong image that invited you to look more closely at the images wand what was in it
· The themes that came forward from some of the neurodiverse members included, disruption, disorganisation, feelings around multiple things going on all at once, focus, barriers, and dissociation
· Some themes and responses from neurotypical readers included, memories, motion, space and form, melancholia, and exclusion
· The use of my hands as a form of non-descript self-portraiture grounded the work as being personal and also felt representative of my point of view in a more literal sense.
Overall the feedback I received was positive, felt the work definitely had a strong sense of identity and invited intense reading with further detail and meaning being found the longer and closer the reader looked at the images. I was especially pleased that my intention that the images are more legible and more accurately read by neurodiverse individuals, whilst neurotypicals come away with a wider interpretation of the images.
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