City to click with photo festival
New event will be here in a flash
Stirling is to host its first photography festival, with a programme of events, workshops and exhibitions running between July 9-18, finishing with an exhibition in August.
In celebration of Scotland’s Year of Young People, the project is the idea of photographers Janie Meikle Bland and Julie Howden, who are leading a team made up of young volunteers.
The festival will offer a range of free events including talks from professional photographers, workshops on portrait, street and food photography and an exhibition hosted by festival supporters Codebase Stirling, The Thistles and Made in Stirling.
One of the organisers, Nadia Schneider, a student of film, media and marketing at the University of Stirling, said: “We have no idea what audience we will attract. I’d also be interested to see how many tourists we will lure to Stirling, and the public will not know what to expect either. Hopefully the mystery will draw them in.”
Janie was first involved in community photography when she lived in Romania. Now back in Scotland, she runs her own participative photography social enterprise, Picture the Possible.
She said: “When I lived in Bucharest I worked with a small group of women supporting charities in their fundraising, through our photography. We also worked alongside them, helping raise awareness of their causes and securing corporate partners and sponsorship. As well as being an accessible art form, photography is a great way of bringing people together, sharing ideas and building communities – and we hope our festival achieves a bit of this.”
Julie is a commercial photographer who believes photography can be a useful tool for simultaneously opening the world up and teaching us to pay closer attention to the many great things around us.
She said: “A camera is like a passport, allowing us into unfamiliar spaces and to meet people we otherwise would not. It also encourages us to pay attention to the seemingly ordinary things around us we may have previously overlooked. For me, photography is mindfulness in action.”
This year the festival has the support of Stirling Council through the European Championships Glasgow 2018. The hope is that the festival becomes an annual feature of Stirling’s growing calendar of cultural events.
Workshops will be free to attend and will run between from July 9-18 at venues across Stirling. For more details or to book a place see www. facebook.com/stirlingphotofest/ and Instagram #stirlingphotofest.