The Photobook Project

Support us to empower people living with dementia through the Arts! Your donation will help us to deliver arts activity to care home residents across the country, giving them a meaningful artistic experience during the winter months.

Who are we?

The Photobook Project is a Devon-based Community Interest Company that invites people living with dementia and their communities to document, share and celebrate their own lives and perspectives through the arts, primarily photography. The photographs captured by our participants reveal moments of joy, beauty, meditation, companionship and silliness, redirecting the conversation around diagnosis away from ‘loss’ and towards the possibilities that still remain in life. Since being founded in 2015, The Photobook Project has been rolled out across the world, including partnerships with Sensory Trust in Cornwall, Run Tomo in Japan and Humanitas Deventer in the Netherlands.

Last year, we expanded our creative output, commissioning the short documentary film, Amanze, which captures the life and experiences of The Photobook Project Ambassador, Ronald Amanze, a music producer who is living with dementia. 

Background

The Photobook Project CIC was founded in 2015 by our Artistic Director Ellie Robinson Carter as part of her Illustration MA at Falmouth University. After losing her grandfather to Vascular Dementia in 2008, she wanted to support others going through this challenging disease and find ways of embracing what is still possible after a diagnosis. 

In 2014, Ellie started volunteering with The Happy Wanderer, a dementia-friendly walking group run by Sensory Trust that supports people living with dementia and their carers to access outdoor spaces. As the group explored the beautiful areas around St Austell, Ellie noticed that the participants were spotting flowers, noticing cobwebs glistening on the trees and having rich conversations informed by their surroundings. The walks were filled with tender, fleeting moments that would likely be forgotten by group members on arriving home. 

As a group they soon decided to capture their walks together.  So, on a dreary November day in the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Ellie brought along two single-use cameras to pass around the group as they walked. On developing the cameras, she couldn’t believe how beautiful the images were, like illustrations in their own right, illustrations by the group of their shared narratives. From this point, the group chose a theme for each walk (such as sound, texture, weather) and took photographs that linked to these themes. 

Ellie decided to present the images in photobooks to resemble old-fashioned travel guides, since the images provided a new way of experiencing place, and gifted them to the individuals who took part, to keep and share with families and friends. In 2016, The Happy Wanderers attended an exhibition of their photobooks at Falmouth University. The featured images enabled the participants to recollect moments and memories, providing them with self-evidence of living well with dementia. For Ellie, this was the beginning of her realising just how powerful the arts can be for people living with dementia: providing a space to capture, connect, self-express, communicate, escape, be transported and reconnect to self-hood. 

What do we do?

In response to a chosen theme (like a season or a meaningful object), participants take photographs on disposable cameras alongside other creative activities, such as writing poems, painting flowers or making cyanotypes. The often tender and breathtaking results are used to create a series of photobooks.

Each collection is kept at the heart of the participating group’s community (for example, in a community centre) and each participant is gifted a photobook of their choice. The arts are a powerful tool for people living with dementia. Keeping these photobooks and sharing them with family and friends enables participants to recollect memories, and embrace the possibility of living well with dementia. We strongly believe that if this is put in place early on in a diagnosis, it can provide essential evidence of what is still possible; that they can still form new connections and  communicate about their experiences in a format that suits them.

This funding will allow us to…

...deliver our project to care home residents across the country, giving them a meaningful artistic experience during the winter months. We will work with care home staff, training them to deliver projects with their residents and setting up an online network for care home staff to connect and share experiences of the project. The delivery of this will be built on research undertaken as part of a residency with The Inclusivity Project where we ran focus groups, interviews and consulted with the National Activities Providers Association to ensure our offer is best suited to care homes. 

Each care home resident who takes part will co-create their very own professional photobook, capturing their life story and present experiences . This will provide them with self evidence of living well with dementia and a memory book for them and their loved ones to cherish.