Reading passage
Every spring, the public library in the seaside town of Whitcombe clears its main hall and hangs several hundred photographs on the walls. The Whitcombe Through Our Eyes exhibition, now in its twelfth year, displays pictures taken not by professionals but by the people of the town themselves. Bakers, retired fishermen, schoolchildren and bus drivers all contribute, and the only rule is that every photograph must show life in Whitcombe.
The exhibition began in 2013 as a modest response to a problem. The town's museum had closed for repairs, and the librarian, Mr Daniel Adeyemi, worried that there was nowhere for people to share their memories of the town. He pinned forty photographs donated by friends to a noticeboard in the library entrance and invited visitors to add their own. Within a month the board was full, and photographs were being left at the front desk every day. The following year the exhibition moved into the main hall, and it has grown steadily ever since.
Today the organisers receive around nine hundred entries each year, from which a small committee selects about two hundred and fifty to display. The selection is deliberately democratic: no more than three photographs may come from any one person, and at least a quarter of the wall space is reserved for exhibitors under eighteen. Each chosen picture is printed at the library, mounted on card and labelled with the photographer's first name and age, but nothing else, so that a picture by a nine-year-old hangs on equal terms with one by a retired teacher of art.
The subject matter ranges widely. There are storm waves breaking over the harbour wall, birthday parties in back gardens, and quiet portraits of shopkeepers behind their counters. One of the most talked-about pictures in last year's show was taken by a seventy-six-year-old woman on her first mobile phone: it shows her late husband's empty chair beside a vase of tulips, and hundreds of visitors wrote about it in the comments book. Mr Adeyemi believes such pictures matter because they record details of ordinary life that official histories usually ignore.
The exhibition has also had practical effects. Visitor numbers at the library have doubled since 2013, and membership has risen by forty percent, which helped the town council justify keeping the library open when other branches in the region were closed. A local printing firm sponsors the mounting costs, and a cafe opposite the library reports its busiest fortnight of the year during the show. Several pictures have been bought by the council for the corridor of the town hall, with the small fees going directly to the photographers.
Not everything has gone smoothly. In 2019 the committee accepted a dramatic photograph of the lifeboat crew which later turned out to have been copied from a magazine, and the rules now require every entrant to confirm in writing that the work is their own. There have also been disagreements about whether digitally altered images should be allowed. The current rule permits basic adjustments of brightness and cropping but bans the addition or removal of objects, a compromise that seems to satisfy most exhibitors.
Other towns have taken notice. Librarians from at least a dozen places have visited Whitcombe to study the model, and four similar exhibitions have already opened elsewhere in the county. Mr Adeyemi offers simple advice to anyone wishing to copy the idea: start small, trust the public, and never turn the exhibition into a competition with prizes. The moment people compete, he argues, they stop showing one another how they really see their town.
This year's exhibition opens on the first Saturday of April and runs for three weeks. Entry is free, and the comments book, now filling its fiftieth volume, waits by the door. For Mr Adeyemi, the long queues at opening time prove a simple point: people do not only want to look at art made by distant geniuses; they also want to see their own streets, their own weather and their own neighbours treated as worthy of attention.