As part of Adult Learners’ Week The Media Workshop ran a promotional stall in West Quay Shopping Centre, Southampton on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th of May. We will be offering a limited number of FREE and low cost short “Taster” sessions in digital photography, poster design and black and white darkroom which will take place in June/July 2008.
Marcia Taylor is a long standing member of the Workshop and used our Open Access resource to print photographs for her contribution to the open exhibition for people with a empathy for Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire.
The Media Workshop worked in collaboration with the NSPCC, Bitterne Police Station, Southampton Women’s Aid and Poet Philip Wells to help young people from Chamberlayne Park School and Weston Park Junior School create a book of poems concerning community safety. The young people participated in several workshops looking at staying safe both on the streets and in the home.
The Media Workshop helped the young people photograph places in the area where they felt unsafe to accompany the final poems.
We also ran art and design workshops to support them in designing the final poetry book.
This project used photography and oral history to enhance a cooking project and culminated in a book of recipe postcards which enabled women at the WEA Clovelly Centre to not only share food but to share their recipes a little further afield by sending their recipes to friends. The groups taking part were the Milan Group and the Wednesday Women’s Group and the women cooked and noted down favourite family recipes, as well as sharing cooking stories. The women also shared their recipes through the Unity 101 community radio station.
Outlined in this report are the method and process of the investigation itself, including the background project which led to the investigation, the framework and tasks created during the investigation and a summary of the difficulties and process taken to arrive at the finished series of tasks.
These pictures are amongst my most recent, I used them for my AS photography exam and they’re examples of work I produced using processes I learnt at the workshop. My GCSE work is currently on show at Southampton Art Gallery and showcases some of the other techniques I have learnt.
I tend to print with high contrast, but recently I’ve been learning to appreciate lower contrast prints. My subject matter varies quite a lot but I like looking at more abstract forms and predominantly still life or landscape, rather than portraiture, though I have done some work in this area.
I’ve been taking photographs for a few years now, I really get a lot out of it, and out of the workshop too. Attending a course at the workshop is what actually got me really interested in photography, it was the trigger if you like, and I’m constantly learning new techniques there or just being astounded by the quality of some of the work I see people produce.
The WEA in Southampton asked us to help create a poster promoting the . Some of the women from the group suggested using objects and items that they felt most summed up Somali Culture. Many of the final objects on the final poster were kindly brought in from the women’s homes.
The Media Workshop joined forces with the Community Languages Service to create . Children wrote about why they felt it was important to learn languages and then decorated huge banners in a series of arts workshops. Over 100 children took part from language groups including those learning Farsi, Somali, Urdu, Mandarin, Punjabi, and Polish and the banners went on display in Southampton’s Art Gallery foyer as part of the city’s International Mother Tongue celebrations. 
Down Memory Lane and A Trip to the Beach are two linked projects being undertaken by The Media Workshop on behalf of the Oral History Unit, as part of the Weston Shorescapes Heritage Lottery funded project. The project has been ongoing in Weston working with many of the residents in the area of all ages
Down Memory Lane has concentrated on recording Oral Histories and photographs from residents in Weston, looking at the changing face of Weston since the 30’s from small country village to the densely residential area it is today. Among the wonderful memories, residents have had stories to tell about the village life in a seaside village during the war, the Rolling Mills, the famous Seaweed Hut and what life was like in the new Tower blocks.
A Trip to the Beach was undertaken with Weston Park Junior School taking children to the beach and then working on projects to learn more about the history and the environment through arts activities. The children made sculptures of their experience of visiting Weston Shore, made informative lift-a-flap posters about the shore and used some of the Oral Histories and old photographs to find out more about the area. The schools work has been collated onto a CDRom to be used as a resource for future work at the school.
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