Out of the Shadows: The untold story of people with autism or learning disabilities

Link to exhibition at Midlands Art Centre: MAC In 2014, I began work on a two-year project with the charity, MacIntyre. The aim was to look at how, with the right support, people with learning disabilities and/or autism could live fulfilling lives. Throughout this time I saw hope and possibility for people who were being supported by knowledgeable and specialised care workers. It left me wondering what happens to those people who haven’t found this kind of support; the ones who slip through the net or whose disability isn’t seen as being quite ‘bad enough’ to need support. How do they cope with the daunting prospect of moving from childhood to adulthood in a world where you need to be able to manage your time, resources and relationships or face the consequences?

Out of the Shadows offers a very different view on the human cost of locking up people with learning disabilities and/or autism. The book, which is published by Dewi Lewis in partnership with Multistory, contains intimate and powerful photographs by Polly Braden, seven in-depth stories by journalist Sally Williams and three first-hand accounts. Together, their stories offer a valuable insight into how they ended up in prison and the challenges faced to find a permenate way out.

This ties in with the 10th anniversary of the influential report No One Knows which highlighted shocking failings in the criminal justice system - yet nothing has changed. People with a learning disability make up 1.5% of the population yet 7% form the prison population. Ten people have shown courage in sharing their personal stories of how they came to be in prison. These stories are disturbing, moving and important in pushing debate on why there has been no change and why people with a learning disability are finding themselves incarcerated because of failings much earlier on in their lives.

Multistory is an ambitious community arts organisation based in West Bromwich in the borough of Sandwell. They commissions acclaimed photographers, artists and writers to work with local people to tell their stories of every day life. Multistory is supported by Sandwell Council and Arts Council England.

Thank you to everyone who was brave enough to share their stories and to Multistory for their support. We look forward to continuing our collaboration in bringing these issues to light.

Multistory

The book can be bought here

Weekend Guardian 27th October 2018

British Journal of Photography 

Adventures in the Lea Valley

Published by Hoxton Mini Press

London’s Lea Valley is strange, exciting, ugly, beautiful and unaccountably mysterious. It stretches down from the Chiltern Hills, near Luton, through east London, meeting the Thames opposite the Millennium Dome. Between the two, it’s an unplanned patchwork of nature reserves, social housing, yuppie apartments, small industries, scrap yards, football pitches, golf courses, cycle tracks, forgotten architecture and vast areas of nothing in particular. Threading it all together is the Lea (or Lee) River, and its canal. A green and wet world, close to the city. There are Londoners to who are drawn to its enigmatic allure, and Londoners who don’t even know it is there.

David and I began taking these photographs in 2004, the year we met. David only ever made pictures when he wasn’t writing.  I was working on documentary projects for magazines and newspapers. Together we began to spend all our spare time in the Lea Valley. We explored mostly by bicycle with one camera, and one light meter between us. We followed the seasons. David liked landscapes with strange incidents. I was a portraitist. We both admired the best street photography. Somehow we combined all those elements, responding to light, space, colour and chance encounters. For long days we cycled and talked, looking, staring, watching, observing. Within a few months we were making the kinds of photographs neither of us would have made alone.

The Lea Valley is photogenic, no doubt about that. But how could we get the peculiar feeling of the place into pictures? And what about the social and economic contradictions? The ecological fragility? The endearingly haphazard character of it all? We just kept shooting, knowing one day we would look back at the mountain of photographs and make some sense of it.

Through the winter and spring of 2005, the mood along the Lea began to change. Parts of its southern end were to be the site of the 2012 Olympics. There was great concern the place would be destroyed. Often we found ourselves in the fields at the proposed site for the main stadium, close to Hackney Wick and Old Ford, where the Lea braids into several waterways. There was a beautiful Victorian metal footbridge, painted light blue. Someone had daubed on it: Fuck Seb Coe. Community groups were mobilizing to resist the Olympic Bid. Beyond the Lea there was little belief that London would be awarded the Games but, on July 6, it was. Nationally there was excitement. In east London feelings were mixed. On July 7, in another global context entirely, London was hit by coordinated suicide bomb attacks.  It was a disconcerting time. We stopped making these photographs, got married and had two girls.

The Olympic Games came and went, and the lower Lea Valley began to come to terms with the legacy. Inevitably, we were lured back to see what had happened. Instead of pragmatic wilderness there were now landscaped parks, manicured greens, and the continuous sprouting of what property developers like to call ‘luxury apartments’. In the shadow of the looming stadium, the little blue bridge remains, the graffiti long erased.

Adventures in the Lea Valley was shown as a 150 image, 15 minute digital slideshow at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London as part of the programme London in Six Easy Steps, Summer 2005. It has been published in many places including ICON magazine, The Independent and The Guardian. This is an extract from the Guardian article in 2005:

“A beautiful photo essay, Adventures in the Valley filled one wall of the group show; it was the most powerful piece in the show. Polly Braden and David Campany spent a year in the Lea Valley, part of which is to become the 2012 Olympic Village. Part nature reserve, part post-industrial concrete wilderness, the valley has had the good fortune to have been ignored by developers; its extraordinary vistas, with Canary Wharf looming over its shoulder, are captured in the 100 or so shots that slow-dissolve into one another. Between the pylons, gasworks, abandoned depots, defunct electricity-generating station and acres of meadowland, the inhabitants of the valley have forged their own little city of allotments, play areas and small businesses (300 of which will be given notice to quit).

Braden and Campany describe this landscape as one of “intimate chaos”. Someone has spray-painted “fuck Seb Coe” on a metal bridge across one of the Lea tributaries, where wildfowl are flourishing. The centre of what will be the Olympic Stadium is currently a beautiful tangle of wild flowers and weeds, seen here in weak winter sunlight. The Lea Valley has been a local place for local people, but there is no angry Little Englandism about the photos, nor any sentimentality – just a pervasive melancholy.”

— Sarah Wise, The Guardian

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Great Interactions: Life with Learning Disabilities and Autism

Published by Dewi Lewis

There are around 1.5 million people in the UK with a learning disability and 700,000 with autism. Polly Braden has worked with MacIntyre, a leading national charity in the field, to show the ways in which it works with the children and adults that it supports. Her photographs look at the everyday moments, achievements and milestones. The subject is complex but the aim is simple: to highlight everyday interactions and life-changing experiences.

These are stories about the barriers faced in life, but they are also inspiring, often filled with moments of achievement in things which once seemed difficult if not impossible – from finding employment or using public transport to gaining a measure of independence, graduating from high school or getting married. Great Interactions looks to engage decision-makers and the wider public to ensure that people with a learning disability receive the same opportunities as anyone else.

'In these intimate photos, Polly Braden captures the inner lives of people with differences and disabilities. She sees their dignity and their sometime pathos; their humor and their disappointment; their optimism and their ability to love. Above all, she documents their intense individuality, and makes you see each one as an independent being. This is not a portrait of disability, but a series of portraits of people with disabilities. It is achieved with clarity, respect, and wit.'  Andrew Solomon, author of 'Far From The Tree'

The great escape: people with learning disabilities on what they love best - Guardian Weekend Magazine. 6th February 2016

Winner of Lens Culture Award 2016 and Silver Award winner of The RPS International Print Exhibition 2016

That’ll teach ’em

That’ll teach ’em

The latest school to take part in Channel 4’s Educating... series is Willows High, formerly one of the worst in the country, where a head who has overcome many obstacles has fought to help students and staff do the same.

Saturday Telegraph Magazine

New York

This is a work in progress, made possible by a Joanna Drew Bursary.

New York’s financial district is in Downtown Manhattan. It is surrounded by water on three sides. There’s no way to expand outwards and so the only way is up. The old infrastructure creaks next to the new show off skyscrapers. The streets teem with people all day - office workers, residents, tourists, rich poor, young and old. This is remarkably different to London’s Square Mile where city workers stream in between 6am and 8am leaving the streets deserted until lunch and then again until 5pm. The Square Mile repels outsiders: there is little to come in for if you do not work there - St Paul’s Cathedral perhaps, or Liverpool Street Station. New York’s financial district is part of the rest of the city.

56,000 people live in New York’s financial district. There are dogs everywhere, constant tourists, no public toilets and the streets stink in the summer heat. The people say the city is not what it was before 9/11. Offices are being turned into apartments. Hundreds stand empty. There are several artist residencies using empty buildings. And yet the new World Trade Centre is going up and will be over 100 stories high.  Four other skyscrapers are expected to be complete by 2020. Tourists come to look and to imagine the day the towers fell. Hawkers sell memorial brochures with pictures of falling buildings and people covered in ash.

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China Between

China Between is a photographic essay on the modern city culture of contemporary China. When the Peoples’ Republic set up its Special Economic Zones in the 1980s communist China entered into global trade and international capital. The goal was financial but new money also brought new values and new ways of life. Polly Braden’s photography is an intimate response to the material and psychological effects of the changes experienced by the country’s new urban class. Shot over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, China Between is a revelatory portrait. Braden shows how a casual glance, a moment of doubt or a quick trip to the shopping mall can tell us as much about modern China as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce.

It was in the mid-1990s while she was living in the town of Yangzhou (where Mao was born) that Polly Braden first took up photography. Making sense of the camera and making sense of China have gone hand in hand. Since then she has amassed a huge archive of images, some made on assignment for magazines but most made speculatively. Although there have been plenty of great shots along the way China Between is not simply a collection of extraordinary images. It has taken most of those years to find the right photographic approach and the majority of images presented here were made in the last three years.  What she was trying to discover, without fully knowing it for a long while, was a form of observing, shooting and editing that might express the complicated relation between everyday life in China’s burgeoning cities and the great transformations that have been taking place there.

— David Campany, writer and curator

These photographs are at once anthropological documents and a personal travelogue; a series of intimate portraits and, more generally, studies of a country undergoing a massive transition from a predominantly agrarian to an urban culture.

— Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine

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Tar Sands

North Alberta, Canada, is sitting on a great pile of oil which is the product of ancient marine life and geological forces some 200-300 million years ago. The reserve of bitumen lies in “tar sands” under a vast wilderness of forest in the basin of the Athabasca river, 430 km north of Edmonton, the capital of the province. The original inhabitants of this area, the Cree, one of Canada’s aboriginal- or First Nation – peoples, boiled up the tarry sands to repair canoes. It was also used to mend leaky roofs. The first oil company built a mine on the banks of the Athabasca in 1967.

Now the Athabasca tar sands are a global concern. A rise in oil prices and the threat of dwindling supplies has sent global corporations pouncing on Canada. Alberta has approved over 100 extraction projects since 2000. Shell’s Athabasca oil sands project meant cutting down forest the size of 33,702 ice rinks. But soon this will be much more. Working mines account for only one seventh of the total land that has been leased for the oil sands development. An area the size of Greece could be stripped of it’s forest.

On the Northern shore of lake Athabasca, Fort Chipewyan was founded more than 300 years ago by a Scotsman, Roderick Mackenie, but First Nation people have been here since the Ice Age, nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived close to nature, ice-fishing and hunting muskrat and moose.

The community has evolved to a steady 1,200, living in modest clapboard houses. The old world prevails but there are signs of the modern worls with a cinema, an ice-rink, an adult education centre.

Fort Chipewyan has an ambiguous relationship with the oil industry. It has bought much needed jobs, paved streets and running water to every home. But there is also a deep sense of anxiety: a study by the Alberta health services in February 2009 confirmed elevated levels of cancers in the community. In 2006 a local doctor recorded five cases of cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile duct.

The Athabasca river flows through their community, that is how they get their drinking water. The locals suspect contaminated water and they believe it has reached their food chain in the traditional food they consume on a regular basis such as duck, fish, geese, mouse and muskrat.

The First Nations people in this area are fighting a huge battle to be consulted by the oil companies before development is permitted. They are not against the companies, they need the jobs and they benefit from the good economy but as a small community it is hard for them to have their concerns heard.

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London's Square Mile

Stumbling into London’s Square Mile  - the heart of the powerful financial district - you could lose your way within minutes. Public streets blur into private forecourts. Seductive passages become corporate cul-de-sacs of soaring glass, steel and stone. Much of the new City architecture has a preening bravado. These are offices built to look great in photographs.  Each new London landmark is launched on a wave of computer generated anticipation, reducing the public city to publicity. But in the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings. Whether or not we wish to, we just don’t mirror these facades.

To a newcomer the City looks impenetrable, like an oiled machine with a hidden logic. City folk might seem coolly efficient but it’s an illusion. Look again and many of them seem out of their element, as if caught between one air-conditioned sanctuary and the next. These are not employees ‘on message’. There is doubt and indecision in their gestures. Others are not dressed for the office at all but residents from the housing estates.

Something of the essence of the City is visible here: the telling gap between official power and the lived experience of flesh and blood. This is a modern England bathed in a light more typical of American street photography. There is no long lens involved. The City teems with people, but selecting just one can feel unbearably intimate. As a locus of power this place voyeur in us, and this is part of the appeal. To look, or more accurately to watch without being seen is a part of what defines metropolitan life. But these photographs are looking for some measure of humanity. To be a voyeur is not always anti-social. It can be very different from the cold gaze of the ubiquitous surveillance camera or the miscreant, more guardian angel than opportunist gazer. CCTV catches every second of every day in the high security Square Mile but it misses the things that really matter.

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Made in China

When you see the words Made in China, do you wonder by whom? One morning I went to Top Shop on Oxford Street and saw the shoes I had seen being made in a factory in China: English size 8, made by girls with feet of size 4.

Ho Ping is 20 years old, a typical age for a factory worker; she comes from Henan Province, 24 hours' travel north of the factory. For two years now she has been working and like all her other co-workers living at Selena. Once a year she goes home to visit her family during Chinese New Year

After leaving school at 16, Ho Ping says it was 'interesting and exciting' coming to work in the factory. For the first few weeks there was little pressure and workers were allowed to make mistakes. After the initial period of meeting co-workers, learning the company song and settling in amongst the 6,500 other employees, work became more demanding and the following six months were really tough. This being her first time away from home, she began to miss her family and friends very much.

These days, some two years later, she enjoys the university-like atmosphere and life at Selena, saying that there is always something new to learn. In a grey coat, she is a supervisor, overseeing the work of 35 young girls who sit in a row on the factory floor and stitch the upper part of shoes. There are eighteen levels in the factory. The system defines the colour of your coat - pink for factory floor workers, grey for everyone above that. It defines the resaurant you eat in the size of your dormitory and your pay.

The photography of Polly Braden documents one individual’s story within China's massive social change. Braden follows Ho Ping, a young girl from the Henan Province, to work for Selena, a shoe factory that produces products for Nine West and Clarks, amongst others. Braden documents Ho Ping and her co-workers, all of whom live at the factory in tight quarters, often operating under strict rules. Concerned less with Ho Ping’s exploitation, Braden focuses on the material prosperity she enjoys. Like thousands of others, factory work has brought her out of poverty and turned her into a consumer - in one picture, Ho Ping shops for shoes with her friends in a mall. Braden then follows Ho Ping home to visit her village where she documents her showing pictures of her new life stored in her cell phone to her family and friends, who still live in an agricultural society that has changed little since the 18th century.

- Natasha Egan, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

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