Blackpool on the Fylde Coast in Lancashire has a strong relationship to photography, visited by many notable photographers with historic relationships to the picture postcard notably The Saidman Brothers.
Our Photography Champions in Blackpool are Claire Griffiths & Henry Iddon, who seek to support the photography community throughout the town and coast and support community connection intergenerationally. Claire and Henry want to provide space for open conversations, advice, and knowledge on funding to increase confidence and identity for and with Blackpool. Planned activities include working with archives, grassroots collaborations, exhibitions and educational spaces.
Their base is Blackpool Community Darkroom, Aunty Social, where they are currently co-creating an accessible space for experimental darkroom techniques associated with well-being, identity and working-class community. The space has already held some photography socials and pay-as-you-go darkroom sessions. Alongside Aunty Social, their local collaborators also include Blackpool Borough Council (Cultural Strategy), Blackpool School of Arts, Grundy Art Gallery LeftCoast, and Showtown Museum.
Claire and Henry are interested in how Blackpool’s connection to photography can hold space in The Town and what photography means in a working-class UK seaside holiday resort. Through this work Claire and Henry seek to support a more coherent photography community in Blackpool.; raising awareness of opportunities and how to access them, and to create a sustained hub, accessible for every level of photographer.
About Claire Griffiths
Claire Griffiths is a Blackpool born photographer who studied fine art at Northampton University.
Throughout her practice, Claire has developed young people’s photography workshops and is an arts award advisor. Developed and delivered Arts Council England supported projects, exploring how we share Blackpool’s diverse and intergenerational stories using photography as a tool for exchange. Such as the Retired Performers Project and with the new Langdale learning disability photographers: sharing space through a diverse lens, photographing the buildings & surrounding areas of borough architect JC Robinson who designed many of Blackpool’s civic spaces such as libraries, public baths, schools and transport sites.
Claire is a member of the Socially Engaged Photographer’s Network and helped set up Blackpool community darkroom and Blackpool social club, an online digital magazine. Claire is interested in how a camera can tell a new story and bring community together to create new stories attached to complex happenings.
About Henry Iddon
Henry Iddon is a photographic and lens-based artist whose practice concerns finding new ways, and reasons, to look at the landscape. While remaining accessible to all, and relevant to the discourse that is contemporary art and culture. He aims to produce work that is multilayered and that can educate and inform audiences. His work has been mediated through traditional film techniques across all formats 10x12inch and 4×5 large format; medium format roll film and 35mm; digital stills and film / video moving image capture. Work has been disseminated via wall hung exhibitions, installations and workshops, book works, news print publications, online and through film screenings. He has films in the National Library of Scotland Screen Archive, and NW film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, and 2D work in various collections including The Wordsworth Trust; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; State Library of New South Wales and University of Tucson Library.
Henry’s photographic and film projects have been both exhibited internationally and presented, with the associated research as papers, at academic conferences and within peer reviewed journals.
