
Photography Workshop
Sun, 24 Mar
|Gunnersbury Park Museum
Learn how to use a camera, take pictures like a pro and have your work displayed in a local exhibition.


Time & Location
24 Mar 2024, 12:00 – 16:00
Gunnersbury Park Museum , Gunnersbury Park Museum, Gunnersbury Park, Popes Ln, London W5 4NH, UK
About the event
DENNIS MORRIS – HOME AWAY FROM HOME
PHOTOGRAPHY TOURING EXHIBITION
Background to the project
This project has been developed in response to, and in conjunction with, local
communities. We are committed to deepening our engagement with, and better
reflecting, the diverse mix of communities we serve. We recognise the need to
address the under- representation of the heritage of local people within our
collections and curatorial practice.
We have been actively engaging and consulting with local communities,
including: Open Days; Heritage walk Weekends; our Being South Asian
photography exhibition, and our National Portrait Gallery partnership project,
Ealing Rises Up, which documented anti-racist activism. As part of this process,
local people identified the work of photographer Dennis Morris, and his
‘Southall - Home from Home’ collection, documenting Southall’s Panjabi
community, and purchased by GPM in 2001, as a key body of work which they
wished to engage with.
The resulting project, Dennis Morris - This Time, will directly involve local
people in documenting contemporary local life, while exploring Morris’s
photographic representations of West London communities almost 50 years ago.
With the distance created by the passing of time, communities will now have the
opportunity to discuss the sometimes difficult and traumatic past, across
generations, developing a shared understanding of their heritage. Some of the
older subjects of Morris’ 8 year-long photographic study of the Panjabi
community of Southall have since died. Younger subjects, like Morris himself,
are already in late middle age.
We have a vanishing window of opportunity to share a body of work with its
original subjects - work which has been long hidden, partly due to the impact of
the Southall riots on cultural programming decisions in the decades that
followed. In Morris’ own words: "No one would touch it…It was too hot for
them. People are now ready to reveal the truth” In keeping with Morris’
definition of his practise as “catching moments in time”, this project will
connect generations through the sharing of images, stories and memories, and
involve local people of all ages in exploring, collecting, curating - and creating -
images that reflect and capture their own sense of their lives and communities.
By exhibiting the photography alongside newsreel footage and oral histories,
the project will provide an important opportunity to discuss the nationally
significant events of 76-79 - the Southall riots, incursion of fascist movements,
the murders of Blair Peach and Gurdip Chaggar - which are prominent in our
community memory.
Ealing is facing significant social upheaval with the arrival of HS2, providing
another compelling reason to capture & share the social history of the migrant
communities who made the area their home in the mid 21st Century, before
memories are lost.
Dennis Morris - This Time is a community co-curated, & co-created, touring
exhibition of Dennis Morris’ iconic photographic series documenting Southall’s
Punjabi community in the 1970s, Southall - Home From Home. As a young
photographer Morris, fresh from capturing Bob Marley and the Wailers on their
first British tour, embarked on an 8 year documentary project capturing the lives
and stories of the largest Panjabi community outside of India. GPM owns 84 of
the photographic prints. This project will bring past and present together,
revisiting Ealing and Hounslow through its residents’ eyes.