Tower and Town, September 2019

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Photography For TTV

Last year, I had the honour to teach photography to a group of TTV volunteers. I am a working photographer but my background is in anthropology and making Radio 4 programmes. I have travelled widely and lived abroad while bringing up my three children, now young adults.

Photography seems the perfect medium for those feeling challenged by the world. It gives an opportunity to think about different “ways of seeing” and looking at things, and to decode the imagery of the social media age we live in. Taking the right sort of picture in the right sort of way involves a range of life skills – showing respect, communicating, understanding – that go far beyond the camera.

For the TTV programme, we each started with a good digital SLR camera, and learnt all of its functions. Once we had honed our skills, we began on our photography projects. The first we called “Humans of Marlborough and Gunjur”. It focused on people with the same profession here and in Africa – midwives, cycle repairers, vegetable stallholders, beekeepers – as a way of exploring the similarities and differences between our two cultures. We also took portraits for the TTV ‘Storytellers’. These were photography projects, but they gave us the chance to engage with a whole range of people whom we interviewed and found out about long before we picked up the camera. An important part of our experience was sharing the photos we’d taken with the sitters afterwards. Giving the gift of a photograph can be surprisingly moving and rewarding.

Eight months later, buoyed up by our experience and knowledge, we set off with our cameras to Africa to do the same projects there. Thanks to digital technology and to the portable printer we took with us, we were able to share photos in Gunjur. Many of our sitters there had never seen or owned a photograph of themselves. Once again, the response was deeply moving.

I hope my photography group will forgive me for saying that when we set off on this journey, everyone was a little daunted, and maybe not feeling very confident about what lay ahead. But my team did amazing work and made extraordinary strides in mastering photography.

By exploring the way images are taken and used, the volunteers were given a chance to read the visual world around them and to develop a resilience through their greater understanding. I feel that in looking through a lens – seeking beauty and inspiration in every situation – you cannot help but end up with a more positive outlook. Equipped with this perspective, I hope that my TTV photographers have gone out into the world happier, stronger people. I am extremely proud of all that they achieved.

Hilary Stock