The Slow Camera Exchange was established in memory of artist Hermann Marbe and speaks to his aspiration of making the arts and creativity more accessible. It supports people from all walks of life to use analogue photography processes to slow down and see the world through a variety of different lenses.

 

The Slow Camera Exchange’s newspaper publication and companion exhibition will launch in the Cork City Centre Library with speeches from key members in the initiative and participants in workshops. 

 

The periodical and exhibition celebrates the artistic contributions of older people who engaged in 6 months of Slow camera exchange activities under the Creative Ireland’s Creativity in Older Age fund. It included workshop programmes, events and pop-up polaroid shoots.  

 

The exhibition has three elements. 

There will be a series of images “Six Months in Motion” created in the project’s 55+ Casual Photography Meetings which ran from October 2022 until February 2023  under the mentorship of Marcin Lewandowski and Artem Trofimenko with the support of Cork City Libraries. 

 

The exhibition will also present ‘Shared Memories’, a series of analogue photographs with text. The images are photographs of members of the Westgate Social Club.  The stories emerged from a series of workshops carried out with Anne Kiely and Carmel Creaner over a 10 week period. The images were captured by Artem Trofimenko as the participants relayed their stories whilst each portrait was taken.

 

The third element of the exhibition are works created by two artists, Mary Rose Marshall and Marie Sexton in collaboration with Hermann Marbe. They collaborated in the GASP artists studio. The works are from 2015 and reflect collaborative cross media creation.

 

This project of The Slow Camera Exchange is funded by Creative Ireland’s Creativity in Older Age fund which aspires to give older people the agency and support to participate in the creative arts. The organisation’s analogue camera collection is the first of its kind in Europe to be catalogued and open to be loaned to members of the public.