Top left: Joanne Coates | Top right: Chris Gleave
Bottom left: Cath Stanley | Bottom right: Karolina Konior
__
Lightbox is Redeye's innovative and unique one-year course, shaping the future of photography for people at an exciting juncture in their careers. We work with dynamic new talent to build group and collaborative exhibitions, helping photographers to become creative producers at a national and international level. We open up people to possibilities, show them what is out there, and where to apply their work.
This page is an update on the achievements of the Redeye Lightbox alumni groups, showing how things have developed for some of the past participants.
2017-18
When we first met the group, we interviewed them and looked at their work at that stage.
Take a look at their profiles here.
During their time with us on the year-long course, we also made a short film to document the experience.
Have a look at their experience and progress in this short film.
Redeye worked with three groups who all chose to set up collectives. Click on the links below to see the work they produced and exhibitions staged:
__
Looking at FORM as an example, here is their mission and artistic statement: A lens-based collective, FORM create and communicate on issues concerning altered identity, Focused on progress through process, we believe nothing is ever fully formed and that we are always in flux. We reject absolutes in favour of experimentation. Compelled by a need for ongoing personal development through critique and conversation, each member brings a distinct practice and background - a multiplicity that perfectly aligns with the collective's core beliefs in cross-pollination and experimentation. Our current works ask questions about gender, health, education and technology - probing the bonds taht build us, processes that shape us and the barriers that ultimately break us.
The output of this group has developed over the years, click here to read about the work shown at Derby Photo Fringe.
Redeye received excellent feedback from the participants on the course. Cath Stanley said: "When I applied for Lightbox, my initial hopes were that it would help me with my own confidence as a photographer and that I would work with others to exhibit. I actually feel it has been a platform in so many other ways, opening up so many more opportunities. In my role as a teacher, I have new-found confidence, with more knowledge about the industry as a fine art photographer. I have secured my student cohort a gallery space at Salford Art Gallery, and we are about to engage in a socially collaborative approach, something which I feel has come from Lightbox. I can see the benefits this has brought in the confidence to my student group.”
Cath went on to set up a new network for female landscape photographers called Landform, and co-curated the Fringe at Derby Format Festival.
__________
2015-16
Top: Jo Booth | Bottom: Ruby Robinson
__
When we first met the group, we interviewed them and looked at their work at that stage.
Take a look at their profiles here.
One group to come out of this year's participants was Strand Collective. They produced Second Skin, a photographic investigation of the nature of identity, posing the question: who are you?
Through a series of documentary photography projects, the members examined the ways in which identity is shaped by complicated social, family and environmental demands. As they explored different areas of our lives, such as identity in the workplace, our private, secret lives, the ethereal world of dreams or the concrete and glass around us, the Collective questioned what we took for granted, peeled away the layers and asked the viewer to look into the ambiguity of the self and the human capacity for social disguise.
Read more about this work and where it was exhbited here.
Strand Collective member Simon said, “We each hold a unique position in the world and we wanted to create discussion around the different roles that we play from day to day.”
__
The second collective to come out of the 2015-16 participants was 7 Day Suit. They focused on a single item of clothing, the tracksuit, and documented, researched and presented its history, evolution and possible future. Through their photographic projects, the tracksuit was used as a medium for exploring the identity of its wearers and gave insight to the rise of the tracksuit from its creation to its imagined future.
You can read more about this project here.
__
From this year's cohort, photographer and Redeye member Rachael Burns visited Brighton Photo Biennial and Brighton Photo Fringe on behalf of Redeye.
Read the blog piece she wrote as she selected her favourite exhibitions.