Ten Things to Take: A community education project to re-image space place @ memory using digital photography

Based within the context of community learning projects this paper will investigate using digital photography as a tool for enquiring into the relationship between people and place. The study is ongoing and is part of a PhD research project entitled: Representing communities and the postindustrial landscape in the shadow of the “Cornish Alps” currently in its second year. This research aims to establish whether representations of the landscape impact on the community living in it. The focus is to identify whether a process of representation alters the relationship between people and place. Through community based digital photography workshops, courses and photographic assignments participants have presented images of their memories, their lives and the places where they live. “Ten things” refers to the projects they produced and the personal responses they have given when presenting their work. Through their digital photographs, the research examines how participants developed and modified their vision of the world and seeks to identify how the practice of digital photography can be used as a research tool and whether arts practice can have a transformative impact on the relationship between a subject and its representation. It also seeks to establish how the nature of digital photography as an instant, democratic and creative tool can be used in community based projects to quickly encourage, amongst other things, cohesion, debate and discussion.