As part of our ACE-funded work, BCVA is proud to be partnering once again with Professor Gil Pasternak of De Montfort University, Leicester, alongside Year 2 photography students from Dudley College.
This project explores the many lives of family photographs through archive, collections, portraiture, and oral history. Working collectively, students are gathering family images, making new portraits, and recording oral histories that reveal the personal, cultural, and historical value of everyday photographs. In doing so, the project encourages students to think more deeply about memory, identity, belonging, and the role photography plays in preserving lived experience.
As vernacular photography is not normally taught during the two years of the students’ course, this project offers a valuable opportunity to engage with an important but often overlooked area of photographic practice. At a key stage in their development, particularly as many prepare to progress into further study, the project broadens their understanding of photography as both an artistic and socially meaningful medium.
The project also reflects BCVA’s wider commitment to working with communities whose histories, family collections, and visual cultures are too often overlooked within mainstream narratives. By encouraging students to work with family images and oral testimony, the project helps connect personal stories to wider questions of heritage, representation, and cultural memory.
The students have received world-class teaching from Professor Gil Pasternak, a leading authority in the field and, in our view, one of the very best in the country. His involvement has brought real depth to the project, helping students to consider family photographs not simply as private keepsakes, but as important social and historical documents.
The work produced by the students will be brought together in a book at the end of the project, creating a lasting outcome that celebrates their learning and preserves the stories and images they have explored.
Professor Gil Pasternak start to teach about family Photography in accordance with BCVA’s work with Dudley College students. IMAGE ©BCVA (An Arts Council Funded project)
Students work in small groups and discuss the stories behind the images with their own family images following a when ,where , who what format for discovery on family history. IMAGE ©BCVA (An Arts Council Funded project)
Students feedback further into a second workshop with Gil Pasternak after work on recreating images for the present day based on their family images from the past. IMAGE ©BCVA (An Arts Council Funded project)
