This Manchester After Hours, join Redeye and The Grid Project, to create a photographic map of the city. Get involved at #MAHGRID16

How it works

The Grid Project is a mass participation photography project led by Dave Allen and Jerry Tew. For each new project, Dave and Jerry draw a grid over a city and highlight intersection points that become locations for a photograph. Participants then get assigned a point on the grid, and are sent off to photograph that point from any perspective they choose. All images are collated and uploaded to create a photographic map of the city! 

How you can get involved

The Grid Project relies on mass participation to work. Whether you are a photographer or non-photographer, everyone is invited to contribute. To do so, visit our base at CFCCA to get assigned a point on the map. It will then be your duty to get as close as possible to the assigned point, take an image of your choice and send it back to us using the #MAHGRID16 hashtag, via email, or bring your image back to the base for upload. 

This project is open to everyone with any type of digital camera; iphone, tablet, point and shoot, DSLR - all are welcome!  

What happens next?

All photographs are collated by The Grid Project and made into a photographic grid like the ones on this site. As well as going up online, there's the chance that the grid will be physically exhibited in the future. 

To get involved and book your place click on the link at the bottom of the page.

For the project to work, it is important that all of the points on the map are photographed. To ensure this, Redeye is seeking local community groups who may wish to enter the project as a group. If you belong to such a club please get in contact with Charlie Booth at Charlie@redeye.org.uk

About Dave Allen
Dave Allen is Head of Photography at The North Halifax Grammar School. He was educated at Moseley Art School in Birmingham and Cheltenham Art College (Fine Art). Most of his work is focused on the urban environment.

Dave says of his Photographic Grids projects:
“They are collaborative ventures, which aim to make a meaningful visual statement about an environment by adopting a systematic approach. What does this place look or feel like? The grid imposes a system that sometimes locates the picturesque but is just as likely to find the industrial, rugged, old, boring, threatening or just ugly.”

The first Photographic Grid project was carried out in Halifax and exhibited at The Dean Clough Galleries in 2004. Two smaller projects were then carried out in London and Paris, before major projects in Birmingham, the first of which was exhibited at The Mailbox, Birmingham in 2008.

About Jerry Tew
Jerry Tew lectures at the Institute of Applied Social Studies at the University of Birmingham.  He has an academic background in geography and social science and worked for some years as a social worker in the Midlands and North West of England.  Among other research projects, he is involved in an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project looking at Mutual Recovery through Creative Practices as part of their Connected Communities programme.

Jerry says of The Photography Grid:
“What makes this special is providing a format for members of the community to reappraise their relationship with a visual environment that they may take for granted.  It invites participants by seek out specified but arbitrary locations within a wider cityscape, and then look around and capture whatever ‘catches their eye’ from the banal to the spectacular.” 

About Manchester After Hours

A one night only, city wide social. A mix of odd couplings and unexpected partnerships. A chance for you to get into places and spaces not normally open after hours. It’s Museums at Night, It’s Manchester After Hours.

Events across the city, Thursday 12 May. For more information visit their website here. Follow on Twitter at @mcrafterhours using the hashtag #MCRAfterHours

Timing and information
Photographic Grids: Northern Quarter After Dark, will take place from 16:00-20:30 on 12 May 2016.

To take part please, visit the Redeye base at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU between these times to be assigned a location and receive an information pack.

The projections will then take place at The Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU from 18:30-21:00. To submit your images to Redeye for inclusion in the projections, please either email them to us (charlie@redeye.org.uk) or tweet them to using the hashtag #MAHGRID16 or bring them to the Redeye stand in the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art to upload to our computer in person.

Images can be from any type of digital camera including phones and point and shoot cameras, but must be in JPEG format. Photographers will retain the copyright on their images, but grant Redeye and Dave Allen a license to use the images for any marketing and promotion of the event, not including syndication.

Image at the top by Alana Silk

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