The Media Workshop’s founder Judy Harrison interviewed by Andrew Ball back in 1999. Photograph (left) taken by Judy Harrison © copyright.

After gaining a first class honours degree in photography at Manchester Polytechnic and an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, Judy Harrison became the first fellow in photography at the former Photographic Gallery now the John Hansard Gallery of Southampton University, in 1977. Funded by the Arts Council the fellowship was used to develop photography in work involved with children.

The founder and director of Mount Pleasant Media Workshop 1979-1992, Judy Harrison is practicing photojournalist, a member of Format Photographers and a Senior Lecturer in photography at the University of Portsmouth. Judy has published and exhibited widely. A director on several arts and cultural organisations, she has also been involved in photographic conferences, seminars and debates around the use of photography in formal and informal education and in a wide and varied number of social settings.

After a long process of learning and consolidating particular methods and technique, I was very interested in doing two things really. The first and foremost was using photography beyond simply an aesthetic medium; as an art form, in a social context. The idea for connecting photography with language development in education involved taking photography much further both as a learning aid and a representational tool in a growing political, cultural and social context.

So I went around all the schools in Southampton to see who would be interested in using photography within their educational context. The school that showed the most interest was Mount Pleasant middle school whose 90% intake of minority ethnic children, who at that time had started to produce their own reading books using a variety of drawn imagery. In 1977 there were very few educational learning resources reflecting a multiracial content and what existed was often characterised by misleading stereotypical imagery.

This created an opportunity to use photography in both a new and positive way. The school input started in a very basic way and we had to overcome the first major problem of a lack of resources. In those days there wasn’t a darkroom at the school so we used a darkroom at La Sainte Union teacher training college where groups of children were taught how to use cameras, develop and print their own photographs that were then made up into their own reading books, visual learning aids and games and used within the classroom situation to reflect the reality of their particular lives, cultures and communities. A clear plan and strategy was implemented over the two years to work in partnership with the teachers and the children I worked closely with the teachers and the children so it rapidly became a three way collaborative effort which I think was quite unusual.

By the end of the two years when the fellowship finished, we had amassed a considerable amount of material and I felt that it had only just started and there was significant potential to carry on. It became the first photography project to be run by and within the Black and Asian community and use photography to address issues of anti-racism. The first important step was to attract further funding. I approached Southampton Council for Racial Equality who showed interest in jointly establishing the project.

In the early days their involvement was crucial not just by employing me and taking over the management but in maintaining a continuation of existing funding and applying for further grants to enable the project to be funded properly in its own right. Subsequently, we received funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation, the Arts Council of Great Britain, Hampshire County Council who gave an urban aid grant and later help from Hampshire Education Authority. By the early 1980s, Mount Pleasant Photography Workshop, as it was then known had acquired a special as well as national recognition as a unique project whose success and strength was unequaled in the U.K. at the time.

The whole aspect of what we were doing was reflected in the commitment of the head of the Mount Pleasant school donating a large former Victorian washroom in 1978 to enable us to operate from a permanently equipped darkroom. This represented a major coup for the project and granted us a luxury of a huge space within the school in contrast to occupying a small temporary darkroom under the stairs of what is now the workshop’s equipment cupboard.

Because we had little money the equipment was governed by what we could afford. From the outset we decided it was of no use running a project like this and producing blurry, out of focus pictures. So, we started off with very basic equipment including a number of plastic Russian Cosmic Symbol camera which despite only costing £10 each, were fitted with a high quality glass lens, capable of producing sharp images. Although this was as much determined by an idea of what would the children would be able to use it soon became apparent that they could use much more technically complex and sophisticated equipment, almost as well as I could. We soon realised that even the youngest children could produce very competent pictures and prints. As the Cosmic Symbols broke down they were gradually replaced with a number of Pentax K1000’s which the workshop still uses. My philosophy was to give the children good equipment both for taking and printing photographs. Because we gave them the respect to look after complex technical equipment, most of the time the children were far more responsible than the adults so much so that they were allowed to borrow the cameras a week at a time a decision which initially surprised some people. Likewise we gradually built up the darkroom equipment from a mixture of second hand but essentially good quality basic Durst enlargers

The decision to work in black and white was determined by both cost and an ability to produce prints, relatively easily. We wanted the children to do it themselves and although we made a number of tape - slide films in colour these were commercially processed. Colour printing would not have adhered itself to that situation; being too complicated, slow and laborious which for the children would have been a total put off.

In 1982 the workshop separated from Southampton Council for Racial Equality to establish its own independent identity, setting up its own management committee, drawn from individual members of different groups within the Black and Asian community which in those early days involved parents, children alongside the establishment of independent youth and women’s groups.

Because I was aware of the potential sensitivity of photography, we made a policy that involved talking to people in their own homes and taking photographs back to explain how they may be used. This approach encouraged a great deal of trust and respect between the community and the workshop, a process that wasn’t achieved in six months but took years of commitment.

The workshop grew up within the prevailing climate of the mid seventies that was already questioning the established politics of documentary photography. Central to this was the whole issue of representation, identity and the importance of cultural diversity which initiated by photographers like Jo Spence, became the subject of numerous articles in magazines like Ten-8 and Camerawork and venues like The Half Moon Gallery that all became involved with various aspects of community photography in the 1980s.

Although a lot of the work we produced was on a small scale, concentrated in the immediate area, we started doing much bigger projects involving a large amount of the work being made into exhibition material in the form of panels that were hired out both locally and nationally as part of a touring exhibition service to a variety of schools and community venues.

Although the politics of representation, identity and culture were the prime issue, there was no separation between technical and creative considerations, and aesthetic treatment was of utmost importance. In 1989 some of the children’s work was included in ‘Fabled Territories’, The New Asian Photography Exhibition in Britain curated by Sunil Gupta a founder member of Autograph the Association of Black Photographers. The work had a national and international significance touring major art venues around the country as well as being shown in Vancouver. This first exhibition in Britain consisting purely of British black and Asian photography was important in reflecting the quality of statements made by the children of Mount Pleasant school concerning their own identity and culture.

I feel, perhaps one of the most interesting and historically expansive projects that I worked on whilst at the workshop was the history of the migration of the Bahtra Sikhs from the Punjab to Southampton which was undertaken exclusively by a group of all ages from the Sikh community It took a long time to do all the interviews which were originally in Punjabi, transcribed in Punjabi, then translated into English and finally edited in both languages. The photographs assumed a new significance as part of an important, expanding historical and cultural archive.

In 1992 I decided it was time to leave the workshop as I felt I had reached saturation point and needed to move on. I also wanted to spend more time doing my own photography.

If I was to start the project all over again? Its a difficult question because of the enormous difference in the political climate. With hindsight, setting up from scratch even today would involve teething processes that would still take a long time to overcome. The fact that digital photography wasn’t around in 1979 meant that we were reliant on using traditional darkroom techniques.

I do feel though that the current interchange between digital and chemical imaging has strengthened conventional photography, rather than having a negative effect. There’s a lot of exciting new photographic work being produced now where there’s a wide cross over of photographic disciplines. You only have to look at the work being exhibited nationally as part of the Photo 98 Year of Photography and the Electronic Image. to realise that there is a new freedom in the styles of work; a growing fluidity in existing boundaries which in lots of ways are strengthening the diversity of statements that photographers are trying to make. That’s not to say the traditional documentary image no longer has its place, but rather this new creative freedom allows differing styles to have a place alongside each other.

As a photographer, both methods are important but technology is still merely a tool to carry forward the real importance of the workshop which was gaining the trust, recognition and participation of the local community.

During the whole time at the workshop I continued to work as an independent freelance photographer; which has always been very important to me to carry on my own photographic work During the early 1980s, I was regularly commissioned to carry out work for voluntary groups, community groups, trade unions etc., including two books for the Trades Union Congress using photography not just as an art form but also as a vehicle of social comment.

In 1986 I was invited to join Format photographers; an all women’s issue based picture agency and library, based in London.The important issue for me in joining Format was that it wasn’t just an ordinary picture agency but a group that has been instrumental in helping to get the work of women photographers recognised. It always offered images with a different perspective and it has retained a deep concern in how photographers images are being used.

I had a number of exhibitions, perhaps the most significant being, ‘She Calls her Song’, a one person show at Southampton City Art Gallery in 1994 as part of SIGNALS; the Festival of Women Photographers. SIGNALS put on exhibitions and events throughout the U.K. and put many women photographers on the agenda in terms of the exhibition circuit and gave them the recognition they long deserved.

In 1994, I was commissioned to produce the photographs for the book, ‘Hampshire A Sense of Place’, by Peter Mason. This involved landscape photography something which was to be very different from the majority of my other work.

What am I doing now? I’m a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Portsmouth, still an active member of Format and combining this with carrying on my other work. I’m interested now, not only in the single image but also in imagery working on a multiple of layers and layers of meaning, using text, narrative and personal histories.

My most recent work resulted from a visit to India in 1997 last year with my children who are mixed race. We went back to the village where my husband was born and spent his childhood. For many years I’ve been interested in migration, survival, and people being displaced by boundaries of all types not only territorial boundaries. My new work is about the cycle of migration; time, space and history, particularly the whole notion of the narrative of journeys, going backwards and forwards and what effect this has on people.