How do you move towards community photography?
I had my small photography business and then a further recession hit. I realised that people just weren’t ordering or renewing contracts the way they had been. I felt I had to find something completely different and I found E-Force Media. They were a training organisation that taught journalism and radio and part of what they offered was a placement, and that really interested me.
They really were fantastic, and when it came to the placement, I knew commercial photography and I had an interview with a small commercial photographer but I also had an interview with Belfast Exposed, which was a little known place in King Street in Belfast.

When I got to Belfast Exposed it was just wall to wall black and white photographs. I knew this was the place for me, it was exactly what I wanted to be part of.
It wasn’t a full-tine job, it was just a placement, but this was my home. This was what I wanted to do.
What did the placement offer you?
You have to remember that a placement was only for a certain period of time, and once it finished you could be unemployed for 6 months before anything else came up. But I knew that Belfast Exposed was where I wanted to be. I could have gone out to get a job somewhere else, but I didn’t want to do that.
With Belfast Exposed, you were being invited into people’s communities, and in those communities you had local people, and where there’s people, there’s stories. And that was what I wanted to be part of. Telling people’s stories through photography, but also aiming to affect change. I have been privileged to do this job and I always say that it isn’t a job to me, it’s a passion.

What is it about working in communities that enthuses you?
I think the easiest way to understand why I enjoy doing this work is that I get to go into communities where no-one knows who I am, and they have to trust me to either tell their story or let me transfer to them the skills I have, to allow them to do that as well.
I always aim to train people to use photography in a number of different ways.
There’s the skills, as I said, to tell their story, and to capture the history of where they live, or if there is an issue or a problem, they need skills to address that as well. They can organise to take the pictures necessary to outline what the problem they are dealing with is.
There is also the transferring of skills so that they might one day be able to work as a photographer. That is something that we are also able to do.

Do you have an example which explains the work that you do?
A good example of that work was in Anacostia in Washington in the United States, so this isn’t a local example but it explains the point.
I was walking around that area every day talking to people. I had flown halfway around the world to give people examples of how to photograph community, but importantly, it was about documenting that community in the way they wanted things to be documented. They had to trust me, and I also had to speak to people, to let them tell me what it was they wanted to achieve.

I was also working with a lot of young people, doing workshops, teaching them how to go about doing their own documentation. And in some cases young people from Anacostia didn’t see themselves as part a community, or even that they liked that community very much, so we had to find ways to show the difficult aspects, and in other cases the positive aspects, of where they lived.

Actually, when you go back there, some of those young people still live in that community, and as they have grown older, their attitude to their community has changed. They realised, over time, that the community mattered to them, that they loved that community. Even those people who had options to leave; they decided to stay there.

To see more of Mervyn Smyth’s work see the following link – www.belfastexposed.org