Culture Shifts is a socially engaged photography programme, working with 11 national and international photographers embedded in communities across seven areas of Liverpool City Region. The project seeks to support communities to explore their stories in a way that is meaningful to them.
Collaborating with photographers, communities have co-authored a series of photo stories: sequences of images that reflect on their identity, interests and lives. Collectively we hope these photo stories will inspire, surprise or challenge people, through exhibitions, an open online platform (photostories.org.uk) and within each of our specially designed Culture Shifts brochures.
Together, as communities, commissioners and photographers, we aim to explore the role of photography as a tool for expression and a platform to challenge stereotypes of localised identities. Each community collaborated with a different photographer, and although throughout the course of the programme some themes emerged time and time again, each project was distinct in its approach to working and in the final work created.
Culture Shifts aimed to challenge questions around authorship in the photographic image, and look at the various strands of collaborative practice each photographer and the medium itself can bring to the work. What happens when we move away from the voice of a single image-maker to that of the collective voice, co-creating, co-narrating and co-curating their own photo story?
Through Culture Shifts, photographers and communities have come together to curate their own messages and broadcast them in a way that is inclusive, collaborative and representative. This is the foundation of socially engaged photography. We are delighted to share both the outcomes and the process of each photographer and community.
Please find the PDF’s booklets for each of the projects enacted under this programme attached here:
