Arts Festival backs After Alice

Local Artists asked to open their workspaces for new photography project

Local artists and craftspeople are being asked to throw open their workspaces for a new photographic project backed by Hebden Bridge Arts Festival.

After Alice is the UK's first community based project dedicated to rediscovering the joy of taking photographs on film and they have own the first of the festival's micro commissions designed to support new work.

Photo from the After Alice Project FaceBook page CC BY-NC, by 'H' Gregg
Click photo to enlarge

They now need volunteers from the Upper Calder Valley artistic community to join in making a visual record of their work and their working environment.

The team will use their trademark vintage cameras loaded with film to make a series of individual black and white portrait photographs of artists at work to be exhibited during the Festival which runs 26 June to 5 July 2015.

The After Alice Project photographers want to find out how do you do what you do? What does your workroom look like when you open the door first thing in the morning? How many hours of laughter, concentration, frustration, and gleeful experimentation are spent there in every season of the year?

Arts Festival Artistic Director Helen Meller told the HebWeb, "This project aims to capture the spirit of famous local photographer Alice Longstaff who documented our town's development and is exactly the sort of interesting entry we created the micro commissions to fund.

"We loved they are using film rather than digital technology and they estimate that if properly kept the film will last for four centuries so future generations can see what we were up to in 2015 in the same way Martin Parr's iconic photos of Hebden does so beautifully."

The portraits showing artists in the workshop, studio, garden shed or wherever they work will be placed in the Pennine Horizons Digital Archive so as well as capturing a single instant of the creative process these brief moments in time have a chance of lasting forever.

If you would like to take part in this exciting new commission you need to live and work anywhere in the Upper Calder Valley, and you need to be able to give a day of your time in the next few weeks.

Volunteers can work in any medium, but the photo-shoot must take place in your normal working environment that has grown with the artist and has a story all of its own to tell to future generations.

If you would like to be considered for one of the 2015 Festival Portraits of Artists and Craftspeople send a short entry of no more than 300 words to After Alice describing what you do, and where you work, together with links or photos where the team can see your work and working environment.

Email your submission to after.alice@yahoo.co.uk by May 25 2015.

Hebden Bridge Web

Arts Festival backs After Alice