FRAMING MIGRATION NETWORK
Anna founded the network in 2025 after hosting two multidisciplinary workshops with international participants. Details of the events can be found at: www.framingmigration.com and below.
FRAMING MIGRATION WORKSHOP 2024
JOMEC, Cardiff.
Reframing Migration: Voices of Witness
Photography has been used for humanitarian ends since its invention in the nineteenth century (see Sliwinski, 1999; Fehrenbach and Rodogno, 2015; Azoulay, 2019). However, the growth of digital media and the acceleration of technological transformation have opened new opportunities for the medium and those who use it as a tool for change. Photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind (see Viewbook - Into the Beyond, 2015) perfectly captures this conflicting interconnectedness between technological advancement, photography, spectatorship, and the stories constructed by images:
We need different stories about different people in the world, told in different ways.… That means diversity of storytellers, diversity of media and discipline, diversity of perspective: telling people something new. Editorial photography is very good at confirming what people already know. Our task is to find a way to challenge what people know or think. Technology and the digital revolution have gifted us with so many more ways to do this and make photography more accessible, reaching more people in different places.
We are inviting you to join us at an interdisciplinary workshop entitled ‘Framing Migration: Voices of Witness’, to be held on October 25th, 2024. This workshop is a collaborative project bringing together experts and practitioners working in the field of photography and human rights campaigns, including researchers, photographers, and NGO professionals, as well as individuals with lived experience such as refugees, conflict survivors, and victims of humanitarian disasters. The aim is to explore the ethical dimensions of photography and contemporary digital culture in relation to humanitarian and human rights campaigning. This is an opportunity for practitioners and scholars interested in the field of photographic history, activism networks, journalism, photography, media studies, human rights, humanitarianism, and visual culture to reflect on the challenges of listening, gathering, and producing visual materials from lived experiences of victim/witnesses/survivors. The workshop will showcase two rich panels of speakers, one addressing photographic value and function in relation to institutional practice, and the other addressing the ethical challenges of photography in contemporary humanitarianism.
Speakers included:
Prof Ariella Azoulay, Modern media and culture Brown University
Prof Sharon Sliwinski, Western Ontario Uni
Liz Hingley, SIM Project
Ivy Lahon, Save the Children UK
Prof Sara De Jong, York University
Larysa Agbaso, VOICES Network ambassador
PAST EDITIONS
Framing Migration Workshop 2019
The new workshop format used offered a unique opportunity for early career researchers, thinkers, photographers & image-makers to come together with the support of industry professionals to share, debate and develop both their own personal projects and critical thinking around the theme, ‘Framing Migration’.
The workshop theme was intentionally broad in the hope that we could together a diverse range of people working within this complex and diverse topic. A wide range of projects were submitted and applicants were encouraged to approach the theme in new and innovative ways. There was a particular focus on the following themes:
1. Activating archives
2. Collaboration & Co-production
3. Ethics and the aestheticisation of suffering
4. Issues of voice and face in representation
MENTORS were…
Daniel Garcia Castro
Daniel Castro Garcia is a UK based photographer/filmmaker. Concerned by the images coming from the Mediterranean Sea, he started the Foreigner project in May 2015, with the aim of contributing a more human and collaborative response to the visual landscape defining this European humanitarian crisis.
In January 2016 his book, “Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016”, was shortlisted for the Mack Books First Book Award and later self-published. The book was distributed internationally and received critical acclaim including a shortlist for the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award 2016.
In January 2017, Daniel was named the winner of the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award 2017. This award resulted in the first solo showing of Foreigner in March 2017 at TJ Boulting Gallery in London, and has since been exhibited internationally.
In March 2017, Daniel was selected as a grantee by the Magnum Foundation Fund, and later, in October 2017, named as the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in Humanistic Photography. This support has enabled the continuation of his long-term, multi-media project, I Peri N’Tera. The study explores the impact of migration on unaccompanied minors arriving to Sicily, trafficked through Africa, Libya and the Mediterranean Sea.
Jess crombie
Jess Crombie is a humanitarian communications consultant, lecturer on documentary image making and ethics at London College of Communication, and is undertaking a PhD investigating power dynamics in INGO image making. While in her most recent role as Global Content Director at Save the Children UK Jess commissioned and co-authored The People in the Pictures, a ground breaking piece of research to ask those who feature in INGO content their opinions on both the process of sharing their stories and their final portrayal. The People in the Pictures: vital perspectives on Save the Children’s image making addresses.
Richard Burton
Richard Burton is the Photographic Officer at Amnesty's International Secretariat in London. He oversees Amnesty’s global photography production, commissioning, producing and working with research staff to illustrate a broad spectrum of human rights focused projects. He has worked in the field of photography for over 15 years for a variety of clients, including Thomson Reuters, documenta, The Week, Associated Newspapers and The Royal Institute of British Architects.
Built for Possibility