EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY PROJECT
The “Every picture tells a story project” is a collaborative arts project between professional photographer James Taylor and Alfie James. The project aims to explore how images can be used as stimuli for inspiring performances. This year we piloted the project with members from our Black Dog Theatre Creation during the Covid:19 lockdown. During our workshops via Zoom James shared his photography skills with our members giving us a insight into the different techniques in creating pictures. Our members were then encouraged to have a go at taking a series of photographs using their mobile phone camera over a week. We then used some of these pictures to devise short performances (monologues) which we then recorded as Audio pieces.
“I’ve really loved taking part. It’s inspired me to remain creative during the lockdown. I’ve not only learnt a new skill, but it’s inspired me to write my own play.” (Pauline, member)
Some of James Taylor's work:
Please click on an image to enlarge
Working with James was really inspiring. I've never been very good at taking photo's, but he taught us some wonderful little tricks and gave us plenty of positive encouragement to have a go ourselves. It was great fun!" (Gary Wade, Member)
Inspired by James' work, we then set out to put into action what we had learnt by creating our own gallery of images in order to explore images as stimuli for performances. As a group we decided that we wanted to base our photo's on happy memories, pictures which had a narrative or recording positive moments in our lives. Below is our gallery of photo's which we came up with. Please click on one of the pictures to see the full gallery.
We then used these pictures taken to inspire us to write our own short monologues in the style of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series. We recorded some of our stories via Zoom as Audio plays for others to listen to.