ANONYMOUS PORTRAITS
by Emma Brown + Young People
This series of anonymous portraits began to take shape during Play for Progress’s first residential retreat in the Cotswolds in April 2019. Working with each of the young people, the aim was to make portraits that reflected a facet of their personality and tell a story whilst protecting their identity.
Young people who participate in Play for Progress’s programmes are advised not to have their faces photographed because if dispersed publicly such exposure could put them at risk. All the same, these young people are teenagers who want and deserve to be seen, heard and represented in public. As an artist who has worked with this specific group of young people over many months, the significance of the resulting final images, when considered in light of their detailed histories, revel intimate and immensely powerful characteristics of each individual’s personality, culture, ambitions and challenges.
Listen to ‘Sounds of Play’ soundscape below, as you explore Emma’s Anonymous Portraits.
Emma Brown is an award-winning portrait and humanitarian photographer, and facilitator of PhotoVoice participatory photography training programmes. A visual storyteller, Emma is intrigued by the poetic character of people and looks for the beauty in small, seemingly unimportant and everyday things. Her calm and meditative approach to photography allow her to create lyrical, humanistic images whilst going almost unnoticed.
Since 2012 Emma has been an Associate Artist with Olive Branch Arts, documenting their work in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in South West Algeria and in 2014 the first book of her photographs from the refugee camps was published. PhotoVoice trained in 2017 she has been running Participatory Photography training programmes based on their methodology in Algeria, London, Greece, Armenia and Hungary. Equipping participants and facilitators with innovative, creative and impactful tools so that they are enabled and motivated.
Emma uses PhotoVoice’s techniques to develop confidence in young people to enable them to visually document their own stories, thereby reducing isolation of their communities through the sharing of photography. Emma strongly believes in the power of art & culture as a means of bringing stories to an international audience and her PhotoVoice projects arm them with the tools and skills they need to do this.
info@emmabrownphotography.com
SOUNDS OF PLAY
by Joe Cryar + Young People
This soundscape that accompanies the anonymous portraits above combines ambient sounds, purposefully created sound/music, and voice that were recorded during Play for Progress’s inaugural residential in April 2019.
This retreat from London’s anxiety-inducing bustle to the peace and space of the countryside was a coming together for the Play for Progress family. We ate, grew, danced, walked created, and made music together. You will hear young people share their experiences of being part of our community along with the sounds of us around the fire, talking over dinner, or playing music. These are the sounds of us being together.
Joe Cryar is a producer, musician and teacher committed to the empowerment of people in vulnerable and marginalized communities through contemporary music production, collaboration, and recording. His focus is on the relationship between ownership, self-image, social engagement, cooperation and the recording and creation of music. Through his work with Play for Progress and in Soundhouse Studio, a studio for young people experiencing homelessness, he has seen the capacity for social change these kinds of projects have as they let the voice of young people from all cultural backgrounds be heard and amplified.
He is based in London where he works as a music producer with artists, filmmakers, and musicians on a variety of projects from short films, to installation pieces and albums.