Friday 28 April 2017 – A stimulating one-day symposium at Goldsmith’s College, New Cross, London called Engaging in urban image making organised by Gill Golding and Anita Strasser. Exploring how image making can support our understanding of some of the complexities associated with contemporary urban life.

Those complexities we heard about ranged across local area political dissent, the vulnerability of a delicate community formed around ten pin bowling, post-terrorist trauma in New York, the loss of London places to property investors, faith communities sharing interests through food, the exaggerated friction of eastern European immigrants and the threat of airport expansion. Even the effect of annual pasture migration of sheep on a northern Italian city.

Most are explored by photographers, filmmakers, researchers through a deep trusting engagement with the communities affected by these complexities. It is an urban photography that looks at causes and effects of social change, reflected in some degree in physical structures and spatial reorganization. This symposium brought several academic and practitioner bodies together.

I wondered, what can visual media do? Photography and film as a means of data collection and research, as a means for engaging with citizens, as a revealer of emotional truth, a counter to prejudice, as a campaigning method, as an instrument of change.

How does urban image making relate to the processes of change and urban place making? How could urban place making make better use of photographic media? How do ordinary people engage with their familiar places, their neighbours and the political process through visual material? The visual is powerful and direct, dominated by advertising and press, so it takes a lot of skill and sensitivity to use that power for community engagement.