| Popis: |
PhotoVoice is a participatory process using photography and digital story telling methods. These skills enable individuals to represent themselves and to create tools for advocacy and communication. This provides a process that allows people to identify, represent and address issues of importance to them through the medium of photography. Aim of this PhotoVoice project was to provide a creative space for people with respiratory conditions to explore through images their experience of living with an illness and to create new methods of engagement between respiratory patients and healthcare professionals. Eleven people with TB and COPD took part in participatory workshops over a period of about 6 months in 2014/5. These were facilitated by a community artist and four healthcare professionals with respiratory care background. Through PhotoVoice methodology participants learned basic photography skills, the use of digital cameras, the meanings and interpretation of photographs and how to tell their own story through images and text. Participants curated several photography exhibitions entitled ‘Life – a reflection through the lens’ and a catalogue of their work which tells not only their personal stories of aloneness, stigma and challenge, resilience, memories and joy but also the individual journeys that participants took over the course of the project. PhotoVoice offered a means of enabling participants to set their own agenda in terms of articulating their illness experience and to choose their target audience. At the same time, their photographs offer a powerful insight into the backgrounding and foregrounding of illness. Participants continue this journey utilising PhotoVoice for COPD advocacy. |
