Issue 31: March 2001 - Youth Work Ireland

A Picture of BallinasloeBy John LanganIntroductionThe Idea of running a photography course arose inApril 2000 while planning the summer programmefor young people in Ballinasloe. The count had twobroad aims, one to give young people a practicalskill and secondly to introduce them to the use ofphotography as a tool to explore people's lives.In July 2000. Galway Youth Federation securedfunding fur the project from The Arts Council throughthe Artist-in-Community Scheme. Eileen O'Leary ofKerry, Diocesan Youth Service, who has extensiveexperience of documentary photography, wascontacted and agreed to run the project.The project ran for one week culminating in anexhibition, which was held in the local library. Fouryoung men took part in the project. The commitmentthey made was enormous, attending each day andworking together for 7 hours daily. In order to havework to exhibit, the young men worked in pairs alongwith a staff member of Galway Youth Federation andthe local Department of Justice Project. The stafftook photographs of the young people completingtheir assignments.Project Weeka caption for each shot. The image number andcaption were recorded for later reference. In additionto learning how to edit their work each day, theyoung people were encouraged to critique their workand suggest where they could improve the quality ofthe images.On Thursday each participant selected his favouriteeight Images from the week. These were thenenlarged 10 by 8 and mounted on white card with acaption and the young persons name. A collage wasmade of the photos the staff had taken of the youngpeople during the week and each person had aportrait taken.On Friday members of the public attended theopening of the exhibition. A local photographer alsoattended to take some shots of the work. The youngpeople were on a high. They were really proud oftheir hard work, which had certainly paid off.All project participants were awarded introductorylevel and Intermediate level Certificates inPhotography from the Northern Ireland OpenCollege Network, One of the participants said at theend of the project, "/ had the best time ever withGeoff, John, Eileen. I will do it again next year".The work remained on exhibit in the library for twoweeks before moving to the Bank of Ireland for amonth. The work was also exhibited in the youngpeoples school.Over the course of the week the young peopledocumented life in Ballinasloe. The group also wentto Athlone to take some photographs of servicesavailable to young people so that we could make acomparison between both towns. As one participantsaid "The second day (of the project) we went toAthlone and we took pictures of the leisure complexand the swimming pool. There is nothing like this inour town. If there were facilities like this inBallinasloe there would be a lot less trouble in thetown''.Each day the young people shot an average of sixrolls of film each. At the start of each day the youngpeople selected their three favourite images fromeach roll. These were put in a scrapbook along withIrish YouthWork Scene 9Due to the success of the summer photographyproject and inspired by the growing interest theyoung people had in photography, a follow-upproject was planned. This project involved aresidential shoot, which incorporated black andwhite photo development. Again we looked to EileenO'Leary to progress the work she had begun in thesummer with the young men.Three of the original participants (the fourth iscurrently living in England), one volunteer, RachaelWhite and I left Ballinasloe early on Friday morningDecember 8th. Our destination was Tralee and moreMarch 2001