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Press gang

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Today I passed the half-way point in a seven-week teaching project I’m involved in, in which I’m helping a group of 10-year-olds put together a newspaper. It’s an interesting experience which has given me a whole new level of respect for teachers – mostly for their patience. I’m enjoying it on many levels but it’s made me appreciate my own job and relieved I didn’t go into teaching as I initially planned to, because I really don’t think I have the personality for it. I spent a year teaching English to French sixth-formers during my degree, which was challenging in different ways. Anyway, I’ll probably write about the exprience properly once it’s over but for now I’ll just share a child’s view of a tour we took last week of the Manchester Evening News office, which tickled me when I saw it today.

Big fat Gypsy hatchet job

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The debate about the infernal Big Fat Gypsy Weddings series, which ended a few weeks ago, continues to rage. This show is becoming the bane of my life at the moment, because of the difficulties I’m having getting what I want for my MA and Rethink project, so when someone sent me a link to this piece from the BBC’s College of Journalism blog, which asks whether the show had been a documentary or mockumentary, I left this comment:

I’m not a Gypsy or Traveller but I am a journalist who works regularly with English Gypsies in the north of England and count a number as friends.

From an audience point of view, BFGWs was great TV – titillating, manipulative, car-crash fodder of the lowest common denominator kind. Most definitely a mockumentary trussed up as factual viewing.

And I’d have to agree with Jake Bowers about the damage it has done. It’s had a huge impact which I can personally attest to, as can any professionals who work with GRT communities (eg traveller education teams, support workers).

I’m doing a documentary photography project with a family who run a (privately owned) Gypsy site in northern England at the moment and the level of paranoia and mistrust as a direct result of that programme is enormous.

These communities have never been very open and it’s always taken time to win people round, but barely anyone else on the site will so much as give me the time of day, such is the fear of outsiders. They all just want to be invisible.

The residents of this site have suffered threats from local yobs, they are being refused entry to pubs and clubs in the town, and their kids are getting teased in school (more than before) about what was shown in the programme. Obviously, they’ve never had it exactly easy, but the perception is that things have got much tougher.

The mum of the family I’m spending time with says BFGWs has set Gypsies and Travellers back 30 years in terms of engaging with outsiders. Officials, artists etc will find it difficult to get onto any camps now, she says, and in some quarters Travellers themselves have turned on each other.

I’ve even heard from a friend who works with Irish Travellers in a town in Lancashire that the young lads are now starting to ‘grab’ girls as a form of sexual harrassment after seeing it for the first time on that programme. It hadn’t really been known of before around there.

My feeling is that Firecracker Films have done a hatchet job on a vulnerable and misunderstood community and I think they’ve done untold lasting damage in the chase for ratings. Tabloid TV of the very worst kind.

Roma and proud

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For the second part of my project on the UK’s Roma, I met with members of the Romanian community from Manchester and Slovakian community from Leeds. I’m convinced that these people are profoundly misunderstood and unfairly tarnished by the actions of a minority. This is the start of a long-term project for me, which follows on from my interest  in the British Gypsy and Traveller community. Download this week’s feature HERE or the entire investigation HERE.

If you live in the North, please buy a copy of the magazine. If it’s a Roma vendor, all the better.

minority report – Manchester’s Roma

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I’m not entirely sure why but this has been the slowest moving and probably the most delicate project I’ve ever worked on as a journalist. I’ve been thinking about doing some work on the Romanian Roma who live near my home in Manchester since last summer and but only started trying to make contact with them in December. Since then it’s been a series of false starts, red herrings and frustrations for all kinds of reasons, not least enormous language and cultural barriers and issues of trust. There are problems with community cohesion in the area so there are sensitivities on all sides. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope and am braced for complaints.  Read the full feature here. Part two – the Roma perspective – will run next week.

frantically quiet

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I’m having a weird few weeks where I’m frantically busy and oddly quiet almost at the same time. I’m taking few photos yet thinking constantly about photography. I’m completely exhausted yet can’t sleep because my mind is racing. I’ve been magazine editing this week, which is always an interesting experience in which I spend most of my time re-writing other people’s stories and correcting their grammar and then read so many edited pages that my eyes and mind go numb. Whereas last week I had little to do because none of my interviews worked out, this week I was juggling the day shifts with a series of interviews I’ve been chasing for ages and which finally came about. Now I’m off to Cumbria for the weekend to photograph a Gypsy, Traveller and Roma event and next week I’ll be attending an intensive workshop connected with next year’s Liverpool international photography festival, Look 2011. There are some very diverse photographers taking part so it should be an interesting week. With 10-hour days and a 60 minute commute on either end, I doubt I’ll get the chance to do very much blogging.

‘I was drinking surgical spirit, just to stop the shakes in the morning”

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Peter, 40, is a recovering alcoholic. He ended up on the streets several times as a result of his addiction but realised he had to do something when his kidneys started packing in. He started his journey to sobriety while living in a squat with other homeless drinkers and drug takers. “I wanted to kill someone. My body was screaming for booze but my head was saying no,” he remembers.

Peter is just one of the people I met at the Booth Centre, a drop in for homeless people in Manchester.

Please listen to his story.

young carers in the Guardian

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I have a piece in today’s Guardian Education section about the Young Carers Revolution. Their film will be launched on June 11th but the fantastic trailer can be seen on the Guardian website. It also contains a few of my stills, and the full film should contain more.

My young carers audio slideshow will be going out to schools along with the film on the DVD. It’s a relief that this won’t be wasted because I haven’t managed to place it anywhere in the media, either paid for or free. That is not for lack of trying and despite many people telling me they liked it.

This gets me seriously wondering about all this energy me and other photographers/journalists are currently investing in multimedia. I love taking audio and in many ways find it a more effective way of interviewing than writing everything down in shorthand, as I was trained to do. I love working with people’s voices and pairing them with images to construct narratives, which I think of like solving a huge audio jigsaw puzzle.

BUT, what’s the point if no one wants it? A three-minute audio slideshow takes me up to three days to produce….and for nothing. I can’t even give them away with my written stories. So who are we making them for – other photographers?