1
1
Photography, public pedagogy and the politics of place-making in post-
2
industrial areas
3
Maarten Loopmans1, Gillian Cowell 2 and Stijn Oosterlynck 3
4
5
DRAFT – not to be further circulated or quoted without permission from the authors
6
7
Abstract: This paper discusses the way in which public photographic depictions of places
8
and place-based communities contribute to the construction of local identity and community
9
building. Being public and visualised statements about what a place and the people living
10
there are and what they are not, photographs incite public debate about place and community.
11
The paper discusses two interventions, one in Ghent, Belgium involving professional
12
photographers from outside the neighbourhood, and one in Bonnybridge, Scotland involving
13
amateur photography by local residents. Both are attempts by community workers to
14
encourage citizens to discuss alternative realities of themselves, their neighbours and their
15
neighbourhood. Combining theories on place-making and public pedagogy, we reveal how
16
both nonetheless exemplify very different strategies to democratize community building
17
processes.
18
19
Introduction
20
1
Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES), K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Maarten.Loopmans@ees.kuleuven.be
2
Doctoral Research Student, School of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland UK; Community
Learning and Development Worker, Falkirk Council, Scotland. Gillian.Cowell@stir.ac.uk
3
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Stijn.Oosterlynck@ua.ac.be
2
1
Local community has become an increasingly important vehicle for, and target of attempts to,
2
rebuild and strengthen place-based forms of social cohesion in our societies (DeFilippis and
3
North, 2004, Lepofsky and Fraser, 2003). However, community-based forms of planning
4
have been shown to produce contradictory results. While some authors argue that they uphold
5
the potential to include marginalized urban communities in decision-making arenas, others
6
point out that they strengthen the voices of already powerful groups, such as the gentrifying
7
urban middle classes in the remaking of places (Loopmans, 2008).
8
9
The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of photographic interventions as a tool of
10
public pedagogy in community-based planning and to assess its democratizing potential. We
11
first examine the theoretical linkage between place-making, photography and public
12
pedagogy and explain how photographic interventions can be seen as public pedagogy
13
projects. Secondly, we discuss two photographic projects: ‘Lijn 3’ in Gent, Belgium and
14
‘This Is Not Bonnybridge’ in Bonnybridge, Scotland. Both projects incited a debate on local
15
identity. A comparison of both cases reveals how Gert Biesta’s theory on public pedagogy
16
(Biesta, 2011) can enrich the debate on art, community building and place-making. While
17
both cases intervene in the production of meaning and identity, they are shown to differ in the
18
character of their pedagogical ambitions and effects.
19
20
Photography and the social construction of place
21
Geographers have long acknowledged the social construction of places as against an
22
essentialist understanding of place. Place-identities are being formed in a social and political
23
process in which the exchange of meaning takes a prominent place (Martin, 2003a). Place-
24
making is considered a relational process (Massey, 2004, 2005; Pierce et al., 2011) which
25
assembles place-elements in bundles of meaning to construct identities. This development of
3
1
a shared local identity can be considered a process of social or everyday learning (Ingold,
2
2000; Mcfarlane, 2011). Place-making is also political for its inherent selectivity: Firstly,
3
particular identities are constructed by selecting specific place-elements or prioritizing some
4
over others. Shared understandings of place identities are assembled through struggle,
5
negotiation and communication (Pierce, Martin & Murphy, 2011). Opposing interests may
6
appear as to which elements are included in or omitted from collectively shared place
7
identities. Secondly, the construction of place identities is political in the sense that it is, in
8
return, meaningful for political mobilization. Place identities can become powerful bases for
9
mobilisation or collective action (e.g. Cox, 1998; Le Galès, 2000; Elwood, 2006; Nicholls,
10
2009). Martin (2003b) considers place identities as ‘place frames’ for collective action:
11
selective, but shared experiences and understandings of collective interests which can
12
stimulate collective organization and mobilization.
13
14
Place-making is an ongoing, dialectic and contingent process. Whereas places might appear
15
to have a stable identity, they are confronted with constant attempts at redefinition.
16
Community building initiatives often consciously engage with place making. Photography in
17
particular is increasingly used in neighbourhood projects (such as photovoice projects, see
18
Wang e.a. 2004; Strack e.a. 2004) for its perceived capacity to represent and open out life in
19
all its variety, nuance and incompleteness. The taking, exhibiting and viewing of the
20
photograph is a political process involved with the ways in which political subjects articulate
21
themselves and their surroundings (Hawkins 2010; McNamara 2009; Fiona D. Mackenzie
22
2006).
23
24
Photography as representation
4
1
In the present article, our focus is on photography projects which engage in the politics of
2
place-making with an explicit purpose of empowerment and emancipation. The
3
representational capacities of photographs have received considerable attention in this
4
respect. Photo-documentary in particular is part of a long tradition of ‘representing’
5
marginalized groups and exposing injustices in human experience (Clarke, 1997; Burrows,
6
2002). Photo documentaries by professional photographers have been considered a powerful
7
tool in this for two distinct reasons. Firstly, photo documentaries build upon a photograph’s
8
distinct capacity to convince us of its simple correspondence to a distant or past reality
9
(Walton, 1984; Dant & Gilloch, 2002). This capacity has been noted as specific to
10
photography by early photography critics as Susan Sontag (1977) and Roland Barthes (1977;
11
1980). Benjamin’s analysis of the political promise of the photograph builds on exactly this: a
12
photograph’s capacity to reveal, to bring things closer to us, to introduce a critical proximity
13
to distant realities which necessitates political judgement: ‘is it not the task of the
14
photographer... to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his photographs?’ (Benjamin,
15
1985, 256).Secondly, documentary photography has a tradition of adding to its realism a
16
degree of emotional aesthetics which triggers reactions from the audience (Fitzgerald, 2002).
17
This aesthetics requires craftsmanship or a sensitivity for what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1958)
18
called ‘the decisive moment’. Throughout the history of photo-documentaries, the artists’
19
sense for focus, composition, light, colour has been deployed to enhance the impact of a
20
picture and adorn the pictured reality with theoretical contextualisation (Sassen, 2011). The
21
goal of the documentarian, Kay (2011) writes, “is to create a normative shift: to invoke a
22
visceral emotional reaction—outrage, shame, sadness—that compels, motivates, and
23
obligates a larger audience to act.” Critics have confronted these qualities of photo
24
documentary for representation as inherently contradictory. Firstly, the potential of
25
photographs to represent realities has been suggested to undermine its emotional power by
5
1
inducing a ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999). Even the most shocking pictures turn banal
2
when represented over and over again; the infinite stream of ‘shocking truths’ renders the
3
viewer numb and indifferent (Sontag, 1977; Dean, 2003).
4
Secondly, the emotional aesthetics of the photographer have been described as manipulative
5
manufacturing of a non-existent but suggested reality. Photo documentaries’ emotional
6
qualities are susceptible to use for propagandist causes by authors from across the political
7
spectrum in the creation of powerful collective identities (Carlebach 1988; Woller, 1999;
8
Finnegan 2010), thereby objectifying and de-individualizing the subjects represented through
9
the pictures (Natanson, 1992). Moreover, the very visceral qualities of a photograph
10
potentially stimulate reject as much as affect from the audience (Rose, 2006). Fitzgerald
11
describes how ‘eroticised’ photographic depictions of unknown or distant social milieux “can
12
have the effect of Othering the subject” (Fitzgerald, 2002, p. 374). . In the end, “the powerful,
13
the established, the male, the colonizer typically portray the less powerful, less established,
14
female, and colonized” (Harper, 1998, p.140) thus casting their dominant gaze upon them and
15
negatively affecting the validity of other ways of viewing social difference.
16
Partly in response to this critique, auto-photography projects have developed and gained
17
prominence in place-making in the past decades. As a blend of autobiography and
18
photography, auto-photography projects like Photovoice have been suggested to directly
19
empower or ‘give voice to’ subaltern groups by giving over the camera to them (Wang &
20
Burris, 1997; Dodman, 2003; Johnson, May & Cloke, 2008). Its success is assigned to a
21
number of unique characteristics of photography as a means of communication. Firstly,
22
photography, as opposed to writing, is considered to be a particularly accessible form of
23
communication. The camera is able to document ‘the subject’s perceptual orientation with a
24
minimum of training’ (Ziller and Smith 1977, 173). Secondly, a photograph, in being a direct
25
and straightforward representation of the world, is also proposed as a robust means of
6
1
communication. Photographs are able to ‘undermine the implicit authority of the written
2
word’ (Walker 1993, 73) which remains too often the privilege of the educated. Thirdly,
3
auto-photography is a practice which resists and redirects the dominant gaze, as it represents
4
a way of ‘looking alongside’ rather than ‘looking at’ the subjects depicted (Kindon, 2003).
5
Finally, auto-photography can also engender social action as it can be a tool to reach, inform
6
and organize community members (Wang & Burris, 1997). To the auto-photographer,
7
photographs raise critical awareness of the self and its social condition as they become
8
“...actual or metaphoric examples of his or her life world” (Armstrong 2005: 34). Mackenzie
9
(2006) emphasizes how visual images can underpin a culture of resistance revealing
10
unwanted, hidden realities and unveiling the contradictions of particular constellations of
11
power.
12
Critics dismiss the somewhat naïve and artificial equation of auto-photography with
13
autonomous representation. Auto-photographers cannot avoid controversy amongst their
14
peers about the representations produced of themselves and their communities (Williams &
15
Lykes, 2003). Even within the group of photographers themselves, conflicts can occur
16
(McIntyre & Lykes, 2004). Photographs by auto-photographers are equally capable of
17
stimulating negative emotional, visceral and sometimes violent reactions from their audience
18
as other photographs (Ewald, 2001). Prins (2011) discusses the way auto-photography
19
projects are susceptible to multiple gazes which influence representation through the pictures:
20
auto-photographers tend towards self-censorship under the impulse of the suspect gaze of
21
other community members, thereby internalizing community norms of privacy and
22
disclosure. Simultaneously, researchers setting up autophotography projects cannot avoid, as
23
an imagined audience, shaping participant photographers’ choices in subtle ways (Prins,
24
2011, 429).
7
1
Engaging audiences and subjects: photography as process
2
The critical commentaries to photography’s role in place-making point to the need to
3
understand the photograph as part of a process which does not stop at the moment of making
4
the picture. Making a picture is related to a wider process of communication and interaction,
5
not just between subject and photographer, but with a variety of audiences which stretches
6
the issue of representation in time and space. Kay (2011) emphasizes how politically engaged
7
photo-documentaries are about building solidarity with audiences, as much as with subjects.
8
As documentarians create calls to action, they need to recognize and engage those who are
9
called. Alredd (2006) discusses the tensions these double ‘solidarities’ give rise to, in
10
explaining how Wright’s early 20th century photo-documentaries should not be criticized for
11
their homogenizing representation of a presupposed ‘African American community’, but be
12
understood as a pedagogic engagement with a white audienceto confront it with the
13
‘inadequacy of its historically conditioned gaze’ (Alredd, 2006, p. 554).
14
The emerging literature on curating as a pedagogy of the audience explicitly relates the
15
process to a politics of place. It focuses on the role of the curator of collaborative exhibitions
16
and site-specific art projects in mediating the tension between respecting the artist’s
17
autonomy and resisting an authoritative enforcement of essentialised understandings of place
18
(Bishop, 2006). Inspired by debates on the relational character of place-making in social and
19
cultural geography, Kwon (2002) calls for community-based art as a ‘projective’ rather than a
20
descriptive enterprise. Projects need to unsettle and raise questions, rather than provide
21
authoritative answers; the curator has an important responsibility in developing opportunities
22
for inspiring confrontations in and beyond the event-exhibition (Doherty, 2007). Such an
23
endeavor has a clear political dimension. For O’Neill and Wilson (2010) curatorship consists
24
of supporting emergent and unknown processes which are not linear, nor exhaustive, towards
8
1
the contesting of categories and resisting any seduction towards pre-defining the subject of
2
the process; the photograph becomes a moment captured in order to put forward alternative
3
representations, to open up hidden, misrepresented and underrepresented areas for
4
questioning. Photographic interventions are about considering your own place in relation to
5
the ‘given place’ in order to test who can and cannot speak (Kaizen (2010).
6
This emergent ‘social/relational turn’ in curatorship studies projects a different light to the
7
issue of representation through photography. It avoids the dichotomous view on dominant
8
versus subalterns representations in the photograph, and points to the process-character of
9
place-making in which a photograph becomes a moment of ‘projective’ intervention. In this
10
process, the character of the curator is put forward as a mediator between photographer,
11
subject and audience. However, where the literature on photography as representation
12
discusses in detail the specific strategic choices photographers are facing in relation to the
13
subject of representation, the literature on curatorship as place-making fails to discuss the
14
concrete strategic perspectives curators are to choose from to develop their engagements with
15
audiences into an emancipator endeavour. In the following paragraph, we discuss how Gert
16
Biesta’s political theory of public pedagogy can help dissecting the strategic potential and
17
problems of a process of ‘projective’ engagement with place between author/curator,
18
photographs, subject and audience..
19
20
21
Place-making as public pedagogy
22
23
To refine our understanding of the strategic and political dimensions of photographic place
24
making processes, we turn towards recent theories on public pedagogy. Public pedagogy
25
discusses photographic projects as pedagogic interventions in ongoing social learning process
9
1
of place making and takes the interaction process with the audience as the focus. In this
2
paper, we build upon Gert Biesta’s (2011) political theory of public pedagogy. Biesta
3
conceives politics as ‘...a process of transformation in which private interests are evaluated
4
and reformulated in light of collective needs and concerns.” (Biesta and Cowell 2012). This
5
involves the presentation of “...interests, sentiments, beliefs, values, principles, preferences,
6
ways of life, aspirations, aversions, and political identities, i.e., all the material that forms the
7
basis of public opinions” in the public sphere (Von Rautenfeld 2005: 187).
8
perspective, the politics of place making constitutes an arena of the public sphere in which
9
private conceptions of local identity and community are shared, discussed and translated into
10
collective imaginations. Public pedagogy considers these as learning processes and
11
emphasizes their potential in stimulating political and democratic awareness. Public
12
pedagogy in particular explores the possibilities for pedagogic interventions: attempts by
13
educators to shape or influence social interactions towards stimulating political social
14
learning.
In this
15
16
Biesta (this issue) distinguishes three types of public pedagogic interventions in the political
17
process which have different intentions and effects: pedagogy for the public (instruction),
18
pedagogy of the public (conscientisation) and a pedagogy that opens up possibilities of
19
becoming public (interruption). Still very dominant in community-building, the first type of
20
pedagogy attempts to define and alter place identities by instructing participants into the
21
public debate about neglected issues or interests. The second type of public pedagogy, which
22
is strongly embedded in the Freirean tradition of community work, attempts to empower
23
marginalized groups by altering their self-conception as political subjects. This type of public
24
pedagogy frames place-making as a political process dominated by specific groups, and
25
emphasizes the need for marginalized groups to challenge their exclusion from the place-
10
1
making arena. The role of the public pedagogue is to facilitate the latter groups’
2
politicization, which takes the form of raising critical consciousness and developing counter-
3
hegemonic representations of place. The third type of pedagogy resists setting a pedagogic
4
agenda or predefining what needs to be ‘taught’. It has at its core a care for a relational form
5
of place-making that is characterised by plurality (Massey, 2004). This implies pedagogic
6
interventions which open up closed place-making processes, staging dissensus by interrupting
7
the normal order of places - without imposing alternative definitions of place. Rather,
8
interruptions enacted by public pedagogues enable new forms of political subjectivity and
9
imaginations of place and community to arise.
10
11
12
13
Lijn 3 and This Is Not Bonnybridge
14
15
Analyzing two different cases of photographic interventions, we will explore how
16
photography works as (part of) a pedagogic strategy. We will focus on how the community
17
educator uses photography to intervene with a particular pedagogical agenda in mind and
18
assess the potential of photography in the politics of place-making.
19
The Lijn 3 photo exhibition in the gentrifying neighbourhood Brugse Poort in Ghent,
20
Belgium, engaged professional photographers coming from outside the area. In the tradition
21
of photo-documentary, Lijn 3 reveals the social misery that continues to be present in the area
22
and incites to reflect on the dominant mantra on creative, middle class urbanization; rather
23
unexpectedly, it stirred a conflict over what is a representative and fair depiction of the
24
neighbourhood and enabled alternative processes of place-making to arise. In the second
25
case, an auto-photography exhibition in the post-industrial Scottish town of Bonnybridge, the
11
1
aim was to stimulate residents, ex-residents and non-residents of the village to photograph the
2
village and make their private concerns more public. The resulting images raised less of a
3
public debate but did stimulate more subtle learning processes amongst the participants.
4
5
The Lijn 3 photodocumentary
6
Brugse Poort is a post-industrial neighbourhood with a strong concentration of social and
7
spatial problems (lack of open space, substandard housing, poverty, drug use, illegal
8
immigrants, intercultural tensions) (Debruyne et al., 2008). In 2002, the Ghent city council
9
started a large-scale urban renewal project for the area dubbed ‘Oxygen for Brugse Poort’.
10
For a couple of years the council concentrated its financial resources and policy attention on
11
this neighbourhood to increase its liveability and attract middle class residents (Stad Gent,
12
2001, Stad Gent, 2007). The urban renewal project involved amongst others the building of
13
new parks and redesigning of existing public spaces, the development of a ‘soft mobility’
14
axis through the neighbourhood, the demolition and replacement of inadequate housing units
15
and a program to improve the access of migrant women to local social services. The council
16
deliberately applied a community-based planning approach by organising participatory
17
processes and strengthening and improving the networks between local organisations (Stad
18
Gent, 2009). By doing so, it aimed to turn around the existing representation of the
19
neighbourhood as a declining poor and migrant neighbourhood. A local socio-cultural
20
organisation called De Vieze Gasten (‘The Dirty Pals’) was given a crucial role in this
21
strategy. They were subsidised by the council to ‘assist’ (through theatre plays, a brass band,
22
story writing, processions, photography, etc.) residents in the change process brought about
23
by the urban renewal project. Important for our analysis is their photographic club called
24
Fixatiefi, which visually documented the life and changes in the neighbourhood.
25
12
1
In the first months of 2010, a social worker in the Brugse Poort neighbourhood organised an
2
exhibition, Lijn 3 (referring to the bus line passing through the neighbourhood), with
3
photographs revealing those living ‘at the margins of the welfare state’ (drug addicts, illegal
4
immigrants, poor housing conditions)(Beke, 2010). The social worker had felt increasingly
5
frustrated with the newly emerging hegemonic representation of the neighbourhood as
6
communicated through the urban renewal project. He believed that the new image of Brugse
7
Poort as a hot spot for the alternative and creative middle classes did not benefit his ‘clients’.
8
Quite to the contrary, his clients were ‘brushed away’ as they disturbed the new positive
9
image of the neighbourhood.
10
With the exhibition the social worker tried to stir a public debate about exclusion and
11
marginalization in our cities and the failure of urban renewal to address these issues. The area
12
he was working exemplified this failure in a very concrete manner. He and the organisation
13
he worked for believe in the power of concrete, real life stories to raise awareness amongst,
14
but also emotionally touch the general public and policy makers. Inspired by the socially
15
critical photo-documentaries of the early 20th century social work pioneers (Huff 1998;
16
Rosler 1989; Finnegan 2010), he decided to organise a photo-exhibition on the marginalised
17
lives he knew from the neighbourhood. He made two important strategic decisions which
18
influenced the effects of his intervention. First, he declined the offer of the local amateur
19
photographers of Fixatief to participate. He believed their images would be too positive (in
20
line with the hegemonic images of the neighbourhood projected through the urban renewal
21
project) and would risk ignoring the problems he wanted to show. Secondly, the photo
22
exhibition was to have an audience way beyond the neighbourhood. Therefore, the exhibition
23
was to be held in a professional exhibition venue, in the city centre, and an editor was sought
24
to publish an attractive exhibition catalogue. In addition, collaboration was sought with
25
professional photographers with a certain fame and some distance to the area. The social
13
1
worker contacted six professional photographers whom he accompanied to the
2
neighbourhood and whom he introduced to the people and issues to be revealed.
3
4
The pictures produced, while overall expressing a degree of ‘artistic’ aestheticism, reveal a
5
mixture of styles and approaches. Some photographers explicitly zoom in on details of social
6
misery (e.g. close-ups of drug injections, of rubbish heaps in squats, of the extremely bad
7
housing conditions of undocumented Roma migrants), while others tried to emphasize the
8
‘normality’ of marginalised groups by depicting scenes of everyday life (kids playing in a
9
muddy street, friends in a pub, construction workers praying at the work site). Finally, some
10
opted for a more humorous approach by including bizarre or carnivalesque elements in their
11
pictures (a beat cop imitating Elvis, a drunk guy in the pub offering a beer to the tattooed
12
skull on his chest, ‘‘retro’ statuettes on a chimney).
13
The photographic exhibition triggered two types of responses from the audienceii. The
14
majority of the visitors of the exhibition applauded the exhibition, highlighting that through
15
the photographs they have seen a glimpse of ‘another community’ which they were not aware
16
of, which appears to be a fulfilment of the organizers’ purpose. However, a vociferous
17
minority responded indignantly. Many of these explicitly identified themselves as being from
18
the neighbourhood, while almost none of the people that responded positively to the
19
exhibition identified where they were from, except for some that said that ‘they once lived
20
there’. Those that responded negatively to the exhibition claimed that the neighbourhood was
21
represented in a one-sided and sensationalist way, ignoring all the good things and initiatives
22
set up over the course of the last years. A wide array of neighbourhood associations
23
responded promptly with an open letter, denouncing the lack of broader context. The social
24
worker himself was shocked by these responses. While he had hoped to receive support from
25
within the neighbourhood against expected negative reactions by city officials, the exhibition
14
1
had laid bare strong tensions within the neighbourhood. According to him, the reactions also
2
adversely affected the marginalized individuals he had attempted to give a voice. The social
3
worker claimed that most of his photographed clients were initially happy with the exhibition,
4
as they felt the photographs portrayed the neighbourhood as they know and experience it.
5
However, the negative responses from the middle class sections of the neighbourhood,
6
claiming that it was unfair to identify the neighbourhood solely with its most marginalized
7
residents, reinforced stereotypes and feelings of stigmatization with his clients. The polarized
8
debate (rather than the exhibition itself) made them feel betrayed and exposed. Disappointed
9
by the adverse reactions, the social worker refused to further engage in the debate he had
10
triggered.
11
12
From a public pedagogy perspective, the story of Lijn3 can be dissected at the double level of
13
intentions and effects. The Lijn 3 exhibition combined an intention to ‘instruct’ the general
14
public about the conditions of life at the margins of the welfare state (‘pedagogy for the
15
public’) with an ambition to undermine hegemonic representations of place. The latter was
16
pursued through a strategy which combined –rather uneasily as its effects showed- the aim of
17
generating a broader critical awareness of the processes of exclusion implied in the urban
18
renewal in order to stimulate political action to make urban renewal processes more inclusive
19
(‘pedagogy of the public’) with an attempt at interrupting the on-going processes of place-
20
making by giving marginalized inhabitants of the neighbourhood, their experiences and needs
21
a public character (‘pedagogy for publicness’). From the ‘pedagogy for the public’
22
perspective, the effects of the photo exhibition were mixed. Most visitors found the
23
photographs instructive as they learned about a part of the community and place which they
24
were not aware of, and the reactions showed some were also emotionally touched. The
25
representations exposed the minute detail of everyday life struggles within a single
15
1
photograph, layers normally invisible to those who are not inside these ethnic or social
2
groupings.
3
For a part of the audience however, this pedagogy for the public did not reach its goal and
4
rather triggered aversion and rejection. This can be related to the way the exhibition also had
5
an intention to interrupt, an intention which materialized to an extent unexpected by the
6
organiser. The social worker used the medium of photography as a way to generate images of
7
people, events and spaces he considered were ignored, unknown and that he felt merited
8
bringing to public consciousness. However, he underestimated the extent to which the
9
dominant image of a creative middle class neighbourhood had already become pervasive. At
10
the scale of the neighbourhood, the images he attempted to give more prominence were
11
interrupting the image of ‘normality’. The interruption it caused opened up a debate on
12
whether the photographs gave a fair and balanced representation of the neighbourhood and in
13
that sense also questioned the hitherto hegemonic representation of the neighbourhood.
14
Ironically, this debate strengthened hegemonic representations of the neighbourhood as the
15
pre-dominant response of local residents focused on rejecting the one-sided representation of
16
the neighbourhood and emphasized the marginal nature of the people and practices portrayed
17
in the photographs. This response inhibited the development of political subjectivity (‘a
18
becoming public’) amongst the marginalized residents depicted in the photographs, as it
19
increased their feelings of stigmatization and exclusion. Furthermore, the debate deflected
20
from the exhibition’s ‘pedagogy for and of the public’ intentions, as it did not stimulate
21
politicians and local organisations to move to action to deal with the problems depicted, and
22
refrained the ‘dominant community’ of local residents from widening their knowledge and
23
understanding of the marginalized and excluded inhabitants in their neighbourhoodiii.
24
25
16
1
Autophotography: This Is Not Bonnybridge, Scotland
2
3
Bonnybridge is a ‘post-industrial’ semi-rural village in Central Scotland. It has experienced
4
significant decline of its major industries in the 1980s, leaving behind vast derelict industrial
5
areas and an extensive but underused canal and railway system. None of the derelict
6
industrial areas have been subjected to government-based regeneration or fenced off from
7
access, leaving the landscape a mix of picturesque countryside and vast tracts of derelict and
8
dangerous industrial sites and mines. Specific policies and statistics represent the area as in
9
need of regeneration and with severe social problems (Falkirk Council 2010; 2011).
10
However, in the past decades, the area has also attracted a wealthier class to large newly
11
constructed private housing estates. Consequently, a section of the town lost its regeneration
12
status and access to certain public funding streams that might have helped to alleviate some
13
of its structural problems.
14
contrary, over time around ten of the town’s public buildings, as indoor meeting spaces, had
15
been demolished, replaced by one community centre that predominantly functions as a sports
16
and youth centre. As in Brugse Poort, the new middle classes inhabiting the new housing
17
estates dominate the limited public meetings and participation initiatives which do take place.
18
Older residents seem to have lost the capacity and interest to voice concerns over the
19
transformation of the area, due to a lack of opportunities available to do so. One of the
20
authors, who works as a community worker with the original and predominantly older-aged
21
residents, questioned why their voices are missing and searched for interventions that might
22
help them ‘to become public’ again.
Therefore little concerted regeneration takes place; on the
23
24
Autophotography was chosen as a pedagogic tool to stimulate the development of political
25
subjectivity and engagement amongst this underrepresented group, and to open up a public
17
1
debate about the future of the community. Different from the Brugsepoort, the community
2
worker had no intention to put forward a certain message through the pictures. In auto-
3
photography the researcher or community worker is less prominent in the production of
4
pictures, and is relegated to an outsider of the resident’s world depicted in the image. Rather
5
than the content of the pictures, the photographic practice itself becomes the tool for
6
stimulating a democratization of place-making in the village.
7
8
The autophotography project set off with a public call to residents to reflect upon
9
Bonnybridge in its transitory state. An advert was placed in the local newspaper for
10
contributions as well as advertised amongst local camera clubs, in the public library, around
11
the village itself and to individuals who were known to the community worker through earlier
12
community work. Cameras were offered if necessary. Eleven photographers from a variety of
13
social backgrounds and neighbourhoods contributed to the exhibition. Only a few individuals
14
had any particular experience in photography.
15
photograph, participants were instructed in rather general terms to take photographs of
16
Bonnybridge in its ‘transitory state’. Different from Brugsepoort, the audience of the
17
exhibition was chosen to be decisively local. Bonnybridge-library, one of the few remaining
18
public venues and hub of local social life, agreed to display the photographs.
19
Many pictures expressed the photographers’ relationships to the hidden, unseen and unknown
20
aspects of the place and the way they lived its history. Both negative and positive
21
perspectives alternated. Negative themes included representations of the temporary closure of
22
the local community centre, littering, civil disobedience, derelict and abandoned industrial
23
areas, lack of understanding of the area’s important industrial historical past. Positive themes
24
included relaxing walking areas, beautiful touristic spots, areas of historical significance,
25
places of their childhood. Photographer-participants were eager for their photographs to
To give residents free reign in what to
18
1
stimulate debates and connections with others living in the area on the issues of loss, decline
2
and neglect, and indeed beauty, pride and aesthetics as raised within their photographs.
3
Different from the more ‘artistic’ pictures in Lijn 3, these messages were expressed in a more
4
one-dimensional and traditional way, extra elements added to the picture to make the
5
message more explicit. For example, several photographers made their images into a collage
6
involving text, to tell a story or put a political point across where they thought photography
7
was not able to. Photographs were manipulated to communicate a particular message, with
8
the use of sepia and black and white, frames around the images or blurred romantic edges to
9
add to the understanding of these photographs, and the places depicted in them, as historically
10
significant to the photographeriv.
11
We interviewed the contributors to the exhibition and all highlighted a range of reasons for
12
contributing which show their own pedagogies of instruction and conscientisation: a desire to
13
communicate to others their anger and sadness at the decline and neglect of specific parts of
14
the village; to show an alternative side of the village based on their personal positive
15
experiences contemporarily in walking around its beauty spots; historically as a place of their
16
happy childhoods. All were eager to start a more general debate about Bonnybridge at the
17
scale of the community, but felt that their photographs did not make this happen within this
18
exhibition, which they were disappointed about. Indeed the exhibition did not create a major
19
stir in the wider community and wasn’t taken up by the media as was the case with Lijn 3. At
20
the scale of the community, it did not have the interrupting effect that could stimulate a
21
renewed publicness of place-making. Nonetheless, it did open up a space for political
22
engagement in place-making at the level of transactions between the photographers and
23
viewers of the exhibition. At the interpersonal scale, the project did involve a public
24
pedagogy which cares for and stimulates publicness. The images submitted began a
19
1
conversation around hidden or symbolic spaces and everyday experiences that were hitherto
2
unseen. Some of the images could not be recognised even by some of those living in that
3
location for a long period of time and by the other contributing photographers, encouraging
4
them therefore to see previously familiar places in a strange way. The exhibition and the
5
discussions between photographers and viewers which unravelled constituted a translation
6
process from private image to public image. For the viewer and their fellow photographers,
7
seeing the place through the lens of the other was an interrupting experience, allowing for
8
new conceptions of the place to emerge and for historical places to be brought back into
9
presence. The photographers revisited particular places in the act of putting forward their
10
own agenda for encouraging ‘seeing’, the viewer and fellow photographers engaging in
11
looking at the visual depictions and considering their own experiences and understandings of
12
the village in a different way.
13
Secondly, the exhibition had the unexpected effect of conscientisation or a ‘pedagogy of the
14
public’ for the participants, as photographers themselves emerged as more confident political
15
subjects out of this experience. Before the start of the project, two photographers remarked
16
that they were not the correct social class to be taking photographs; as working class males
17
their role was not to do artistic things. In the course of the project, participants became more
18
convinced about their political capacities and about the potential of photography to change
19
something in the community, which is a necessary part of the political agency they gained
20
through the project. The act of taking the photographs allowed each participant to put forward
21
how their place looks to them, developing their own place and themselves within this. It
22
became a process of political subjectification, a way for them to gain political agency, assert
23
their own ways of ‘seeing’ and experiencing their community, and test their own
24
representations and experiences in the public domain with other residents with different
20
1
representations and positionalities (see Biesta 2011). Illustrative of their regained political
2
confidence, the photographers themselves initiated a second photography project to explore
3
and raise awareness of the poorly equipped shopping streets of Bonnybridge, and the people
4
who actually live and shop there.
5
6
7
8
Conclusions
9
In this paper we have discussed the use of photographic interventions in place-making
10
processes by two community workers in Belgium and Scotland. The cases reveal the
11
relevance of considering photographic interventions in place-making as ‘public pedagogy
12
projects’ and reveal the ways community workers as ‘curators’ become co-producers of
13
meaning in collaborating with the producers of political art ( experiences, perceptions and
14
representations reframed in a photograph), towards setting out pedagogic engagements
15
between viewers,producers and subjects of photographic projects.
16
Discussing these interventions from a public pedagogy perspective reveals the complexities
17
of relational place-making and shows that there is more strategic decisions to be made than
18
choosing between defending the position of dominant or marginalized groups. A public
19
pedagogy perspective reveals how the same goal of democratizing place-making can be
20
pursued from a variety of strategic perspectives, and that depending on these perspectives, we
21
can engage in a pedagogy for the public, a pedagogy of the public or a pedagogy for
22
publicness. Depending on this choice, photography can be deployed as a pedagogical
23
instrument for instructing the general public and policy makers on neglected images of place
24
(as in the photo-documentary tradition exemplified by the Lijn3 case), for conscientisation
21
1
and stimulating political agency of marginalized groups in the making of place (as in many
2
Photovoice projects) or for interrupting normality to open up the public sphere to alternative
3
perspectives on place (as was the intention in the auto-photography project of Bonnybridge).
4
However, our case studies also reveal that photographic projects are complex processes
5
which tend to create unpredictable effects in relation to the perspectives and motivations of
6
the ‘curator’. In our analysis, we have begun to unravel the complexity of place-making-
7
through-photography in four dimensions.
8
Firstly, it has become clear that the intentions of the curator-community worker do not
9
always align with the intentions of the participating photographers. Photographers can add
10
additional layers of motivation to the project, which can conflict with or support the curators’
11
intentions.
12
Secondly, this impacts upon the content communicated through the picture, and the form of
13
the picture. Whereas the community worker in Ghent kept a relatively close eye on the
14
content of the pictures, it is clear that even there, the photographers skilfully tried to
15
emphasize their own particular interests as revealed in the personal ‘artistictouch’ each
16
picture transpires. In the case of Bonnybridge, the community worker did not put any
17
constraints on the content or form of the pictures and left this crucial communicative element
18
to the participants to decide. The interactive ambitions of the Bonnybridge photographers
19
have certainly had an impact upon the fact that their pictures portray personal, individual
20
stories, whereas the Lijn 3 pictures reveal an attempt to express the ‘exemplary’ in the first
21
place.
22
23
A third element which remained out of control to the organizers of the interventions were the
24
interpretations made by its viewers. The cases have made clear to what extent interpretation
25
is an uncontrollable element. At the moment of interpretation, the content of the picture
22
1
connects to place-elements already existing in the minds of the viewers. In Lijn3, the content
2
of the photographs clashed with the image of the neighbourhood pre-existing in the minds of
3
a number of middle class residents, and the ‘exemplary’ has been read as caricaturing. This
4
unexpectedly incited a certain ‘pedagogy for publicness’ which opened up a debate on the
5
‘true image’ of the neighbourhood. At the same time, the debate inhibited a ‘pedagogy of the
6
public’ which might have offered the marginalised groups characterized on the pictures a
7
greater degree of political self-consciousness.
8
9
Finally, the interpretation of pictures also interacts with the context in which the picture is
10
framed. Contextuality goes beyond the kind of intertextuality with existing place-frames as
11
described in the previous point. Rather, it also refers to the scale and place it aims for in its
12
place-making attempts, and the scale and place at which viewers reflect upon the pictures. In
13
both cases, different parties involved were referring to different scales and places. The
14
community worker in Lijn 3 wanted to make a general statement about urban renewal in
15
deprived neighbourhoods in Belgium, therefore deliberately choosing for famous Belgian
16
photographers to make ‘exemplary’ portraits and a major, central city exhibition venue to
17
show the pictures. However, the content of the pictures, the name of the exhibition and the
18
way it was interpreted by Brugsepoort-residents as caricaturing this particular neighbourhood
19
relegated the ensuing debate to the neighbourhood scale, thereby altering the subject of
20
debate and the public pedagogy of the project in a direction the organizer didn’t want it to go.
21
Alternatively, in Bonnybridge, the organizer and participants had hoped to start a debate at
22
the municipal level by inviting photographers from various backgrounds and hosting the
23
exhibition at the local library. Again, the pedagogy of the project shifted in unexpected
24
directions as the ‘pedagogy for publicness’ remained at the interpersonal level predominantly
23
1
and an unexpected ‘pedagogy of the public’ developed as photographers developed
2
themselves into more self-conscious political actors.
3
4
In sum, our exploratory analysis of the public pedagogies of photographic interventions in
5
place making has revealed a complexity of processes to be explored and theorized in further
6
detail. Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy enables a more nuanced understanding of such
7
community building attempts, showing how various intentions and effects can be attached to
8
attempts at democratizing place-making, which merit further research.
9
Our analysis not only dissects photographic interventions as sets of different, but
10
interconnected pedagogies, but also reveals some strategic issues ‘curators’ of photographic
11
place-making interventions should take into account. First of all, we have revealed the
12
necessity for continuous reflexivity and flexibility as curating means, in essence, managing
13
an inherently unpredictable and complex set of processes which cannot be planned
14
beforehand. Secondly, part of the unpredictability can be decreased by taking into account the
15
potential divergences and uncontrollable elements we distinguished. Both intentions of other
16
collaborators and existing place frames of audiences have been shown to influence the
17
content of what is communicated. Being aware of and open to the multiplicity of intentions
18
collaborators hold, and discussing these beforehand and along the way decreases the
19
unpredictability from the side of collaborators; continuous analysis and reflection upon the
20
place-frames held with intended audiences will increase understanding on how they interact
21
with content purveyed.
22
Finally, curators of site-specific interventions need to take into account the relational
23
character of places in thinking on the context in which they frame their interventions.
24
25
24
1
2
3
4
5
References
6
Alredd, J. (2006) From Eye to We: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices,
7
Documentary, and Pedagogy, American Literature, 78 (3): 549-583.
8
Armstrong, K.B. (2005) ‘Autophotography in Adult Education: Building Creative
9
Communities for Social Justice and Democratic Education’, New Directions for Adult and
10
Continuing Education, 107: 33-44.
11
12
Barthes, R. (1977) Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath, New York: Hill & Wang.
13
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard, New York : Hill & Wang.
14
Beke, J. (2010) Lijn 3: Beelden & verhalen uit de stadsrand van Gent. [Images and stories
15
from the Ghent urban fringe] Antwerpen: Luidon.
16
Benjamin, W. (1985) One Way Street and Other Writings, London: Verso.
17
Biesta, G.J.J. and Cowell, G. (2012). How is community done? Understanding civic learning
18
through psychogeographic mapping. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31 (1): 47-
19
61. Biesta, G.J.J. (2011) Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong
20
Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
21
Bishop, C. (2006) The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, Artforum
22
International, 45: 178-183. (Claire)
25
1
Cartier-Bresson, H. (1958) The Decisive Moment, Paris/New York: Simon and Schuster and
2
Editions Verve.
3
Burrows, L. (2002) Larry Burrows Vietnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Clarke, G. (1997).
4
The Photograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5
Carlebach, M.L., 1988. Documentary and Propaganda: The Photographs of the Farm Security
6
Administration. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 8, p.6–25.
7
Cox, K. (1998) Spaces of Dependency, Spaces of Engagement and the Politics of Scale, or:
8
Looking for Local Politics, Political Geography, 17, 1-23.
9
Dant, T. and Gilloch, G. (2002) Pictures of the past: Benjamin and Barthes on photography
10
and history, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5 (1): 5-25.
11
Dean, C. J. (2003) Empathy, Pornography and Suffering. differences: A Journal of Feminist
12
Cultural Studies 14(1):88–124
13
Debruyne, P., Oosterlynck, S. and Block, T. (2008) Sociale innovatie als basis voor
14
stadsontwikkeling. Grootschalige stadsprojecten versus sociale stadsvernieuwing in Gent.
15
Ruimte en Planning, 28, 18-33
16
DeFilippis, J. and North, P. (2004) The emancipatory community? Place, politics and
17
collective action in cities. The emancipatory city?, 72-88.
18
Dodman, D.R. (2003) Shooting in the city: an autophotographic exploration of the urban
19
environment in Kingston, Jamaica, Area, 35 (3): 293-304.
20
Doherty, C. (2007) Curating wrong places... or where have all the penguins gone? In O’Neill,
21
P. (ed.) Curating Subjects, Amsterdam: De Appel.
22
26
1
2
Elwood, S. (2006)
3
organizations, and GIS-based narratives. Annals of the Association of American
4
Geographers, 96: 323-341.
5
Ewald, W. (2001) I wanna take me a picture: teaching photography and writing to children.
6
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
7
Falkirk Council (2010) Denny Learning Community Profile 2010. Falkirk Council.
Beyond cooptation or resistance: urban spatial politics, community
8
9
Falkirk Council (2011) Denny Learning Community Profile 2011. Falkirk
10
CouncilFinnegan, C.A., (2010). Social Engineering, Visual Politics, and the New
11
Deal: FSA Photography in Survey Graphic. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 3(3), p.334–
12
362.
13
Fitzgerald, J.L. (2002) Drug Photography and harm reduction: reading John Ranard,
14
International Journal of Drug Policy, 13: 369-385.
15
Mackenzie, A.F.D. (2006) ‘Against the tide’: placing visual art in the Highlands and Islands,
16
Scotland, Social & Cultural Geography, 7 (6): 965-985.
17
18
Hawkins, H. (2010) Turn your trash into... rubbish, art and politics. Richard Wentworth’s
19
geographical imagination, Social & Cultural Geography, 11 (8): 805-827.
20
Harper, D. (1998) ‘On the Authority of the Image: Visual Methods at the Crossroads, in N.K.
21
Denzin, Y.S. Lincoln (Eds), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, London: Sage
22
Publications.
27
1
Huff, D.D., (1998). Every picture tells a story. Social Work, 43: 576-583.
2
Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment, Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and
3
Skill, London: Routledge.
4
Johnsen, S., May, J. and Cloke, P. (2008), ‘Imag(in)ing ‘homeless places’: using auto-
5
photography to (re)examine the geographies of homelessness’, Area, 40 (2): 194-207.
6
7
Kaizen, W. (2010), ‘’Please Teach Me...’: Rainer Ganahl and the Politics of Learning’, in P.
8
O’Neill and M. Wilson (Eds) Curating and the Educational Turn, Amsterdam: Open
9
Editions/de Appel.
10
Kay, T. (2011) Building solidarity with subjects and audience in sociology and documentary
11
photography, Sociological Forum, 26 (2): 424-430.
12
Kindon, S. (2003) Participatory video in geographic research: a feminist practice of looking?
13
Area, 35 (2): 142-153.
14
Kwon, M. (2002) One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity,
15
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16
Le Galès, P. (2002) European cities: social conflicts and governance, Oxford: Oxford
17
University Press.
18
Lepofsky, J. and Fraser, J.C. (2003) Building Community Citizens: Claiming the Right to
19
Place-making in the City. Urban Studies 40, 127-42.
20
28
1
Loopmans, M. (2008) Relevance, gentrification and the development of a new hegemony on
2
urban policies in Antwerp, Belgium, Urban Studies, 45, 2499-2519.
3
4
Martin, D. (2003a) Enacting neighborhood, Urban Geography, 24: 361–85
5
Martin, D. (2003b) ‘Place-framing’ as place-making: constituting a neighborhood for
6
organizing and activism, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93: 730–50
7
Massey, D. (2004) Geographies of responsibility, Geografiska Annaler B, 86: 5–18
8
Massey, D. (2005) For space, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.
9
McFarlane, C. (2011) The City as a Machine for Learning, Transactions of the Institute of
10
British Geographers, 36, 360-376.
11
12
McIntyre, A.. (2003). Through the eyes of women: photovoice and participatory research as
13
tools for reimagining place. Gender, Place & Culture, 10(1), p.47–66.
14
McIntyre, A., and Lykes, M. B. (2004). Weaving words and pictures in/through feminist
15
participatory action research. In M. Brydon-Miller, P. Maguire, & A. McIntyre (Eds.),
16
Traveling companions: Feminism, teaching and action research (pp. 57–77). Westport, CT:
17
Praeger.
18
McNamara, S. (Ed). (2009). Voices of recovery. Boston: Boston University, Center for
19
Psychiatric Rehabilitation.
20
Moeller, S.D. (1999) Compassion fatigue: how the media sell disease, famine, war and death,
21
London: Routledge.
22
Natanson, N. (1992) The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography,
23
Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.
29
1
Nicholls W (2009) Place, networks, space: theorizing the geographies of social movements
2
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34: 78–93
3
Noland, C.M. (2006), ‘Auto-Photography as Research Practice: Identity and Self-Esteem
4
Research’, Journal of Research Practice, 2 (1): 1-19.
5
6
O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (2010). ‘Introduction’, in P. O’Neill and M. Wilson (Eds)
7
Curating and the Educational Turn, Amsterdam: Open Editions/de Appel.
8
Pierce, J., Martin D. and Murphy J. T. (2011) Relational place-making : the networked
9
politics of place, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (1): 54-70.
10
11
Prins, E. (2011) Participatory photography: a tool for empowerment or surveillance? Action
12
Research, 8 (4): 426-443.
13
Rose, G. (2006) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual
14
Materials, London: Sage.
15
Rosler, M., (1989). In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography). In Bolton,
16
R. (ed.) The contest of meaning: Critical histories of photography, Boston, MA: MIT Press,
17
p.302–40.
18
Sassen, S. (2011) Black and white photography as theorizing: seeing what the eye cannot see,
19
Sociological Forum, 26 (2): 438-443.
30
1
Scottish Government (2009a), Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.
2
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/SIMD/DataSourcesSuit/SIMDOverall09
3
(Accessed 01 December 2011).
4
Scottish Government (2009b), Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation: Datazone Population
5
2007. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/SIMD (Accessed 01 December 2011).
6
7
Stad Gent (2001). Bestuursakkoord 2001-2006, Ghent: Stad Gent.
8
Stad Gent (2007). Bestuursakkoord 2007-2012, Ghent: Stad Gent.
9
Stad Gent (2009). Urban Renewal and Community Based Planning, Ghent: Stad Gent.
10
Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography. London: Penguin.
11
Strack, R.W., Magill, C. and McDonagh, K., (2004) Engaging youth through photovoice.
12
Health Promotion Practice, 5(1), p.49.
13
Von Rautenfeld, H. (2005) Thinking of Thousands: Emerson’s theory of political
14
representation in the public sphere, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (1): 184-197.
15
Walker, R. (1993), ‘Finding a silent voice for the researcher: using photographs in evaluation
16
and research’, in Schratz, M. (Ed) Qualitative Voices in Educational Research, London:
17
Falmer.
18
Walton, K.L. (1984) Transparent pictures: on the nature of photographic realism, Critical
19
Inquiry, 11 (2): 246-277.
20
Wang, C. and Burris, M.A. (1997) Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for
21
participatory needs assessment, Health, Education and Behaviour, 24 (3): 369-387.
31
1
Wang, C.C. e.a., 2004. Flint photovoice: Community building among youths, adults, and
2
policymakers. American Journal of Public Health, 94(6), p.911.
3
Williams, J. and Lykes M.B. (2003) Bridging theory and practice: using reflexice cycles in
4
feminist participatory action research, Feminism & Psychology, 13 (3), 287-294.
5
Woller, J. (1999) First-Person Plural: The voice of the Masses in Farm Security
6
Administration Documentary, Journal of Narrative Theory, 29 (3): 340-366.
7
Young, L. and Barrett, H. (2001) ‘Issues of access and identity: Adapting research methods
8
with Kampala Street Children’, Childhood, 8 (3): 383-395.
9
Ziller, R C. and Smith, D. E. (1977). A phenomenological utilization of photographs. Journal
10
of Phenomenological Psychology, 7, 172-182.
11
Ziller, R.C. (1990) Auto-photography: observations from the inside-out, Newbury Park, CA:
12
Sage.
13
i
See the following weblink for a selection of photographs of daily life in the neighbourhood made by Fixatief:
http://www.fixatief.be/pdf/BOEK_BP_gefixeerd.pdf [last consulted on 19 february 2012]
ii
We analysed the responses to this photographic exhibition by looking at the guest book of the exhibition,
newspaper clippings, open letters and the local blogging site Gentblogt.be. We also interviewed several key
players in the neighbourhood.
iii
We are only considering the immediate responses to the photo exhibition here, as a couple of months later,
partially after discussions with external actors (amongst which one of the authors), a range of local organizations
organized a reflection process (entitled ‘Precaire Puzzel’ or ‘Precarious Puzzle’) and set up a campaign for a
‘solidarity neighbourhood’.
iv
Pictures and some more detail on the exhibition is given on http://thisisnotbonnybridge.blogspot.com/ (last
consulted on 19 february 2012)