Look & Learn was a free short series of lens-based workshops facilitated by UWE Bristol Photography students Josh Adam Jones & Alesha Hickmans. The sessions were across two weekends & centred around themes of community, place-making & mental wellbeing, encouraging participants to explore their local area of St Anne’s, Bristol in a new & exciting way.
10 student volunteers assisted with teaching a basic introduction to photography whilst being on hand to enrich each workshop activity. The main focus of Look & Learn is to encourage exploration of place and promote positive mental wellbeing through the act of photography.
This project was developed by Josh Adam Jones, Alesha Hickmans and Jack Gibbon, and is gratefully supported by UWE Bristol Community Fund and Quartet Community Foundation. Follow _lookandlearn on Instagram to stay up to date with the project.
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Look & Learn’s Inaugural Exhibition
Running daily from 07-30 September at St Anne’s House
Look & Learn would like to invite our friends, new and old, to their inaugural photography exhibition & zine launch in the Top Floor Gallery.
This collective show brings together work made by UWE Bristol Photography volunteers and people from the St. Anne’s community from a series of photography workshops around place exploration, alternative processes and mental well-being.
Look & Learn’s Zine
Is available to purchase at the exhibition. A physical collection of the photographs in a beautifully curated & designed zine.
Alesha is a Bristol based fashion and documentary photographer, who embraces the playful and experimental nature of this medium. Her work is rooted within an editorial practice, yet still utilising tools such as location and styling in order to embed narrative and storytelling within her photography. Collaborating with other artists, designers, stylists, hair and make–up artists, as well as photographers and filmmakers, has become a vital part of both her practice and process. Just last year, Alesha was invited to photograph at both New York and Paris Fashion Week which enriched her knowledge and love for fashion photography even further.
Most recently, Alesha has created a body of work re-visiting a favourite childhood novel; The Famous five, by Enid Blyton. By capturing modern clothing within the fashion idiom and a range of diverse, re-imagined characters, Alesha aims to challenge social issues identified within the original series of books, such as racism, homophobia, and sexism. This project titled ‘The Promise of Happiness’ has been made into a magazine and an accompanying short film.
Josh Adam Jones (b.1995) is a British artist and photographer whose work often centres around stories of misrepresented places and the people who live there. From ageing Irish populations in British towns and cities to the expatriate communities of Oman, Josh hopes to facilitate conversations about identity, home and interculturalism through his work. In his most recent ongoing series (Sometimes A Silence Will Cut Through Sounds), Josh explores the therapeutic applications of photography in response to his Grandfather passing away and a family history of mental health problems. He completed a BA (First Class Hons) in Photography in 2018 and graduated with an MA in Photography at UWE Bristol in 2020.