North South Divide: photography symposium

Saturday 15^th May 10am- 4pm
£15 including refreshments, lunch and a tour of the exhibition
To book contact
Gallery Oldham Cultural Quarter Greaves Street Oldham Ol1 1AL
T: 0161 770 4653 E: gallery Oldham@ Oldham.gov.uk www.galleryoldham.org.uk

An event for anyone who has an interest in the history and tradition of social documentary photography in England.

Chaired by Ian Beesley who has created this exhibition

Speakers include

Shirley Baker
Born in Kersal, North Salford, and moved to Manchester at the age of two.
Her photography began in the early sixties with a compulsion to record “the face of a people at a time when their homes were being demolished and they were being uprooted due to a huge 'slum' clearance programme.”
She has worked as an industrial photographer, a freelance writer and photographer on various magazines, books and newspapers, and as a lecturer at Salford College of Art and Manchester Polytechnic. Her work on Salford “Streets & Spaces Urban photography was published in 2000 by the Lowry Press.

Ian Beesley
Born Bradford West Yorkshire.
Began photographing in the 1970s the demise of the textile trade, this has developed into a longitudinal socio-political study of the demise of industry and its effects on society. He is the course leader for the MA in photography at the University of Bolton. Nominated for the Fellow in Photography at the National Media Museum in 2008, he is currently working with the poet Ian McMillan on a number of projects including “The Drift” an exhibition and book about one of the last coal mines in the Yorkshire coalfield.

Paul Reas
Born Bradford West Yorkshire
is a senior lecturer in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales Newport. He has, for the last twenty years, had a deliberately varied photographic career. He has exhibited widely, both Nationally and Internationally, and his work has been included in many major survey exhibitions of British Photography, the most recent being ‘How We Are’ photographing Britain, at Tate Britain in 2007. He has published two books, I Can Help’ and ‘Flogging A Dead Horse’. Both Cornerhouse Books publications.

Martin Wainwright

Born in Leeds
is Northern editor of the Guardian. His latest book True North rather than dwell on a Bennett-esque, Billy Liar and Satanic Mills pastiche of northern England he aims to provide a more balanced view of the region.

Subtitled In Praise of England's Better Half, it's a personal analysis of a corner of the country which boasts breathtaking countryside, dynamic industry, high culture, community spirit and a very real multi-cultural, cosmopolitan lifestyle.