The beauty of the arts project.
 
A few years ago I was asked to design a project as part of an ongoing Arts intervention called Northcott Narratives. The national arts company BighART had been working with tenants in the Northcott Housing estate in Sydney’s Surry Hills, an infamous estate with a reputation for drugs, suicide and social dysfunction. 
 
 
 

 
Also fear and distrust. I wanted to find a way to get people –strangers- communicating and building relationships with each other and realised the photographic portrait was the ideal solution. I asked Northcott residents to find someone they thought would make an interesting subject, someone they were curious about or wanted to get to know. I then got those people together and one would take the other’s portrait, with as little or as much input from me as I felt was necessary at the time.
 
As I was mainly interested in the relationship between the two tenants, I didn’t teach them formally about photography but rather about the importance of  what happens between subject and photographer in the portrait process. In all but a couple of the resulting portraits I did all the camera work (when a tenant did use the camera, the digital SLR operation always got in the way of the flow of the shoot) but importantly gave ownership of the images to both the ‘photographer’ and the subject.
 The project quickly gained momentum primarily because I made sure we went through digital proof sheets and handed out prints in the Northcott community centre, where there were always other people around to express an opinion on the images. Thus a portrait session involving 2 or 3 people, often ended up involving 10 or more people and suddenly everyone wanted to take part.
 
After an initial exhibition in the community centre, there were exhibitions at the Australia Council, at Slot gallery, a prize winning piece in Newtown’s Walk the Streets, and the high point, 36 beautiful prints at the Museum of Sydney for the 2006 Sydney Festival, 10 of which are in the permanent collection.
 
All fantastic for the subjects and photographers of Northcott, for the community of Northcott, and for my portfolio and profile as a photographer new to Sydney. I now have a number of commercial clients picked up directly or indirectly as a result of the work I did at Northcott.
 
Best of all though was that it worked- Tenant by Tenant was instrumental in helping rebuild the Northcott community. It established relationships between individuals, social groups and communities initially divided culturally and ethnically (my personal highlight was a cooking class held by the Chinese community, attended by the Anglo-Australian community with members of the Russian Community popping in and out seeing what was going on).
 
Tenant by Tenant wasn’t financially self funded- the initial money came from an Australia Council grant, virtually all of which was spent on materials- but my time was completely donated, fitting in Northcott shoots and meetings around my commercial work.
 
I have no doubt photography is the perfect medium for this type of arts project, and the portrait is by far the most powerful way to carry it out- it forces people to engage with each other, to talk about things they may not normally talk about, they discover things about each other and often realise how much they have in common. And they own beautiful prints to look at and show people whenever they like.
 
For more photographs- keithsaundersphotography.com, go to Galleries, Tenant by Tenant