Photography and Lived Experience

About the exhibition

The exhibition Photography and Lived Experience showcased the politics of looking, and critical engagement with looking and representation. It showcased the work of five postgraduate photographers in the School of Art, Design and Architecture: Alex Beldea, Thomas Duffield, Tim Brown, Sam Welburn and Simon Weldon. The exhibition was preceded by a symposium on the subject of lived experience in the research, practice and reception of photography with a keynote address by Dr Benedict Burbridge (the University of Sussex). 'The gaze' in the exhibition Photography and Lived Experience was turned firmly towards photographic processes and outcomes, asking questions such as: how does photography enable us to see beyond the limits of our own experiences (as an apparatus of viewing)? And how is photography materially and constantly changing the reality of lived experience?

About the researchers

Alex Beldea is a postgraduate photography student at the University of Huddersfield and a freelance photographer. His work for this show explored the plight of 32 male refugees from a range of African countries, who spent eight years stranded in Tunisia waiting for international relocation, using photographs, interviews, letters and video.

Tim Brown is a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield. His work presented in Photography and Lived Experience represented the early stages of an investigation into colonie vacanze (children's summer camps) operating during the years of Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1930s-40s Italy and the difficult heritage they represent as both neglected and repurposed architectural sites.

Thomas Duffield is a photographer working in the North of England and London, and postgraduate student at the University of Huddersfield. His personal work offers a quiet and intimate insight into domestic life. His commissioned work has appeared in The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Financial Times.

Sam Welburn is a photographer and PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield. He holds and MA in Digital Media and a BA in Photography. Welburn's work focuses on landscape and the built environment. His work for this show examined the passing of the traditional seaside holiday town, capturing the "rhythms" of the seaside industry and specifically the fate and "lost and fading culture" of the Northern English seaside.

Simon Weldon is a photographer based in the North of England and a postgraduate student at the University of Huddersfield. Weldon's work for Photography and Lived Experience was a personal journal responding to his father's own collection of photographic material "in a pursuit of answers and resolution" following his father's death.