Sanctuary
Sanctuary is a body of work by photographer Jonathan Turner of Lens Lab Project and members of the Welcome House Photoclub: a group of asylum seekers and refugees in Hull. The project began documenting the refugee football team, Acorn FC, but grew quickly into a collaborative photography group. Through Photoclub, participants used cameras to tell their own stories: exploring everyday life, the world around them and the group’s activities.
During a time of national division and unrest, Sanctuary offers a quiet but powerful counterpoint - a collective portrait of resilience in Kingston upon Hull, a City of Sanctuary.
A Chapeltown Archive
A Chapeltown Archive was created as part of Chapeltown: Photographer in Residency, a year-long project between Leeds Caribbean & African Centre, Lens Lab Project and Historic England, to support a six-month residency for a photographic artist. Solomon Charles-Kelly was appointed to undertake the residency and produce a contemporary portrait of LCAC, Chapeltown, and the community. A selection of this work is now held in the Historic England Archive as a longstanding documentation of the Chapeltown area.
City Stories: Common Ground
Lens Lab Project spent a year and a half working closely with communities from six of the most represented faiths in our city, gathering stories and capturing portraits of people and place through photography within these thriving communities. City Stories: Common Ground brings together the result of conversations and image-making, revealing the extraordinary diversity of everyday lives within the heart of our city’s communities.
City Stories: Common Ground was held at Mill Hill Chapel inside The Priestly Hall, and brought together a cross-section of activities, images, sound works and conversations as an exhibition and programme. Held within the historic building of project partner Mill Hill Chapel, it offered the public a chance to connect to a vast body of engaging work built through this process.
Leeds is a city of over 170 languages and multiple faiths; in 2022, it was revealed that the UK was no longer a majority-Christian country. Lens Lab set out to connect to these communities by making sound and image work across an 18-month process reflecting their commonalities and differences. Alongside their primary purpose of worship, the spaces they occupy allow communities to come together in shared activities: weddings, funerals, religious festivals and celebrations, teaching, rites of passage, and the sharing of food.
Hundreds of years of history have shaped these spaces, the past etched into the wood of the floorboards. Each scuff, mark and scratch is a form of another’s presence. We pass by these spaces every day, without really thinking of them. We imagine we know what is inside, to already be familiar with something so close to us. The Mosque, the Synagogue, the Church - places like these become almost abstract without direct interaction. But spaces like these are what communities are built upon and bloom. City Stories: Common Ground looks at the traces formed in these moments and the rich tapestries that are interwoven by their history.
City Stories: Common Ground was made possible thanks to project partner Mill Hill Chapel and funders Leeds2023 and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Portrait Of...
Lincoln Green, Burmantofts & Mabgate
During May 2021, Lens Lab made portraits of the community in our neighbourhood. We wanted to make work rooted in the location of our studio, so we set up a series of pop-up street-based photo studios in community spaces, from shop fronts and roadside pavements to Lincoln Green Mosque on Eid.
We wanted to find ways to encourage the community to get involved, so we chose to use a variety of photographic techniques spanning the history of photography. This included using a Victorian-era Collodion wet plate process on an old, large-format camera, as well as a brand-new digital camera with an old lens.
The Collodion Wetplate process involves coating a 5x4” plate with wet chemistry (collodion & silver nitrate) and making an exposure. As the collodion has an ISO value of around one, the exposures can be quite long: 1-10 seconds outdoors, longer if indoors. The plates then needed to be developed in Lens Labs mobile darkroom (an old pram) before they dried out. Simple process, really.
These were then placed next to a beautiful, colour image shot on a brand-new DSLR. The contrast between the two images was fascinating, and we were impressed by the enthusiasm people showed in being involved. People loved being able to watch their wet plate portrait develop in the fixer tray, and then see their colour digital image on the back of the DSLR.
Portrait Of Lincoln Green, Mabgate & Burmantofts was funded by Leeds 2023.
Cargoes:
Linking the Tyne & the Thames
Fitzrovia Noir’s Cargoes project examines cultural and industrial links between the Tyne and the Thames, in the context of current levelling-up initiatives between North and South. Cargoes seeks to explore historical innovations and contemporary practices, whilst reflecting on past links between the two geographical areas. Both locations, once-thriving commercial hubs built on maritime trade, connected by their respective rivers, are now entirely changed spaces in which very little remains of their industrial past.
Artistic director Garry Hunter commissioned Lens Lab to produce portraits of members of the community in both locations, using the historical wet collodion process, on both glass (Ambrotype) and tin (Tintype) plates. This is not just the making of an image, but also a chance for the public to engage with the physicality of the object and process. The handling of these materials creates a direct link between the industrial, material-driven heritage of the areas, and with those who historically worked in the industries which once occupied these spaces. In our digital world the physical object seems all the more impactful, and allows us to draw causal links between our past and present.
This project was funded by Fitzrovia Noir & Heritage Lottery Fund.