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Alex Sturrock: Guy Gormley asked me if I wanted to do something for Brickhouse and I kept thinking of ways to include mobile phone photos, as I really like how little control you have over how they come out. They are very different to pictures you see in mainstream media--they don't have that gloss that can make pictures seem so unreal. Guy and I chatted about making the exhibition "live" in some way and I thought it would be cool if it started as blank walls and the content came in as it went on.How did you get in contact with all these people?
I just spent a long time emailing people. When I was chatting to a photographer who was involved named Preston Rolls in Zimbabwe, he told me he showed my emails and website to all the kids and they were really excited. After I heard that I couldn't go back. Suddenly, it felt like a responsibility and the main reason to get the show working was to give them somewhere to show their pictures.
They sent pictures from their phones when they could--the internet coverage in some of these places isn't great. The images then went to a computer in the ceiling of the gallery, which had a rolling slideshow and when a new image came in it was added to the end of the show, so each story grew chronologically.
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Preston Rolls sent in images from Zimbabwe's Mufakose township, where HIV is at 50 percent, average life expectancy is around 35 years, and 50 percent of the children are orphans. We had Ben Depp in Port au Prince, Haiti, where an IDP [Internationally Displaced Person] Camp named CR5 is under threat of forced eviction. The landlord has armed men threaten the camp residents. Hala Al Safadi in Gaza; Jake Simkin, Leslie Knott and Elliot Woods in Kabul; and Ian Willms in Don Valley, Toronto.What was the story there?
A man named Don lives on an old garbage dump. To pay for food and supplies, he digs up antique bottles and sells them to collectors. The tunnels he digs go deep underground and, according to Don, there have been people buried alive in similar holes around the dump.
Yeah, although I think those pictures were really beautiful, actually. They showed that as long as your content's good, you can shoot photos with anything.What about the Kabul stories?
They offered something different. They're images from places we see so much negative stuff written about, yet these were really warm stories. The skaters in Kabul are an amazing set and they look like they are having a great time in the face of a pretty fucked up situation. The images from Zimbabwe are really intimate, they're shot by the kids and young people of the area. You can't take pictures like that unless you are part of a community, I think it's a rare insight.
