Photo North: a celebration of people and place

March was a good time to be a photography-lover in Leeds. The Photo North festival was back for three packed days of talks, screenings and conversation woven around the Carriageworks in Leeds.

On Saturday, Carolyn Mendelsohn opened the talks with an introduction to her career and most recent project, This Is Also Motherhood. She described her journey from photographing her family to commercial success as a passion for creativity that led her to chase light and tell stories.

This Is Also Motherhood is a powerful project exploring the experiences of women affected by serious mental health challenges during and after pregnancy. Mendelsohn explained her approach to telling their stories in the most careful and honest way; transporting all her equipment to create their portrait wherever they felt comfortable, using a single item as a still life to represent the traumatic pinnacles of their stories, and photographing their handwritten accounts of their experience to be placed on muslin and hung with the images.

It was a moving talk, woven with Mendelsohn’s care for her participants and love of her craft. The space she created for her participants’ experiences and respect for their perspectives imbued her tender images with a powerful gaze underpinned by crisp light. At the end, she was surprised with a fellowship to the Royal Photographic Society, commemorating her rich career.

At the other end of the Saturday, the final talk by Arteh Odjidja was an entreaty to everyone present to pursue the projects they care about. He opened with five questions, asking the audience to reflect on what stories they wanted to tell and reminding those present that we learn about the world through each others’ experiences. “Photography is an incredible medium to educate ourselves and open our minds,” Odjidja told the audience.

His encouragement hinged on his own journey from the heady world of fashion photography to pursuing more story-led projects. His first project, Fears + Dreams, was focused on the stories of migrants searching and working for a new life and found its start in a serendipitous encounter at Moscow Fashion Week. From there he has taken on other work that seeks to give voice to those who the media may have homogenised and dehumanised, or simply overlooked.

At the festival, some of Odjidja’s photographs from his Rise for Bayelsa project were on display as part of the Leeds International African Arts Festival’s Earthwise section. This focused on the human relationship to the Earth and also featured work by John Moussa Kalapo, Oluwakemi Oluwunmi, and Tobi Dosummu. Dosummu’s striking close-ups of hands working clay felt so textured they almost oozed from the walls.

The main hall of the festival was crossed with a maze of white walls constructed to feature the photography projects, with some additional series tucked away along the balconies and rooms on the floor above. There was a hum of conversation, as small groups of people gathered in different nooks around the room while they discussed and perused the work.

The festival focused largely on documentary photography and the North. The Jaywick Sands Happy Club by David J Shaw was a particularly beautiful project; a collaboration between the residents of Jaywick Sands and the photographer. Shaw’s black and white images captured moments of tenderness and joy, a counternarrative to a widely-spread story of deprivation.

This attention to quiet moments and stories was a running theme across many of the striking projects. Where The Carneddau Meets The Sea by Mike Abrahams and The North Revisited by Simon Hill painted images of diverse communities, while A Portrait of Cricket by Tom Shaw brought everyday cricketers in a softly-hued spotlight.

Rich in heart, the festival was a tender celebration of humanity and the power of photography to tell stories and give voice.