Thank you very much. And it's been it's been an amazing day.
I've been literally glued to my screen as if I watching my favourite film of all times.
I thank you everybody who's been here and and thank you to the people organising.
Should I just share my screen now? Fast forward women in photography.
And this is the Web site, and obviously Instagram was started after a discussion.
Can't even move on now. OK. Moving on between my colleague at University Creative Arts, Karen Noor,
and I started talking in 2013 about the way our women students were getting on in the world.
And we noted that we had about sometimes 100 percent women in our classrooms are suddenly at master's level,
and yet we still weren't becoming visible enough in the outside world.
And I'm well aware of the significance of what VR Williams is talking about, how we talk about women and success.
And I know that there are many successful women. But what I was interested in is the fact that many women are not visible enough.
What we were interested in. And I think also something else well said, which is really important in relation to what we're trying to do is,
is think about an idea of a redefinition of what is a career.
And everything we talk about in our society seems so over, defined by the patriarchy, I thought.
So I thought that was a really important point. We're also very interested in the idea of rediscovering photographers.
So this is the this is the steering committee.
And Maria Paiva is the network facilitator. So we have a great group of people who've been incredibly helpful and supportive all the way.
This is the front of our Web sites, which I hope that after this many of you will subscribe to.
So it's quite clear what we're trying to do in very simple terms.
And this is why we started. And in a way, I was looking at this earlier.
It's already looks old fashioned because so much has happened since 2014.
But when we started this, we didn't really didn't feel that women's photographers were well enough told.
And I know I was really interested with Terrace's introduction and some of those books are in my slideshow as well.
So there has been a lot that's written, but we need more and we need to focus in different ways on how to promote women.
These are a few things that were happening at the time that we started the project or just after.
There are also we also identify there there. There are other issues for for it for women of Towfighi, aside from not being noticed as photography.
And some of these issues are shared. And some of the discussion we've had along the way is wanting to talk about how we can deal with these issues.
So just a few examples of numbers. And of course, I can't.
Can I get rid of that? I don't see myself in the corner.
Sorry, I'm content on this often enough. The Art of Totally Royal Academy, 98 Photographers for Women, Cruel and Tender,
which was Tate Modern's first major photography show, 2003, 24 photographers, three women.
And and it goes on and, you know, possibly the most shocking BBC for history of British photography, which is much more recent, had four programmes.
And throughout these four programmes, there were only eight women photographers, although there were women curators and writers,
and they were all dead women photographers, despite the final programme being focussed on contemporary photography.
So here's some of the wonderful books that have been written either about women in photography or or around women photographers photography,
and they date right back to, as Taoist said, the woman's eye, which I also understand to be the first book about women in photography to firecrackers,
which may not be the most recent now anymore. There might be something new, but it was the most recent when I made this slideshow.
So what we can discuss is what will we to do?
And networking has been mentioned several times today.
And I really think this is a key. I think Deborah mentioned the urgency of of networks and networking and also somebody
else mentioned how how we should be how we should be creating productive networks.
And, you know, we were thinking, Carol, I was thinking like, you know, what would the guys do in this situation when I've got something to say?
And, you know, they would go to the top institutions, to the big players and photography.
So we went we made a meeting with Tate Modern and we had a fantastic discussion with show our Melbourne and Simon Baker,
who were both there at the time. And they agreed to do a symposium in 2013 to test the waters to see what the interest was.
The interest was enormous. And the symposium was sold out at embarrassingly people knocking at the door to try and come in last minute.
And so after that, we agreed to follow this up in 2015 with the first Fastforward Women Photography Conference in collaboration
with Williams at University Arts London and obviously at Tate Modern and with University for the Creative Arts.
And, you know, this was incredibly supported by both by all three institutions involved.
And we're all incredibly grateful to them after that.
And, you know, again, that was incredibly successful, very completely sold out.
And you can see all the recordings,
all the video recordings on our website of all these conferences we went on through the help of Maria Piver to do the same.
Another new conference at the National Gallery of Art in in in Lithuania.
Which was 2070. That was our second conference off, the first conference,
I applied again with help from my colleagues, editing help from my colleagues to the Leave Him Trust.
And was successful in gaining a networking grant with six partners who are incredibly dedicated masses of their time.
Also to make this happen.
And here are the partners listed who are still involved with working with us and continuing in the energy that came out of this.
And again, you can see all our all these workshops, the summaries of all the workshops, they were all recorded and the recordings in our archive.
But we assured everyone that these recordings would not be made public except for individuals doing research.
And so the summaries of all these workshops are on on the Web site.
Maria also started incredible Instagram site, Instagram page.
Women in photo fastforward, women in photo, which now has almost 15000 followers.
And it's incredible. It's really, really interesting.
And in the new year, we're going to start some live conversations to test out a series of life conversations on on this site.
So please also join that. It's just a few pages from it.
Really incredibly vivid and lots of exciting new imagery.
I'm just always looking at it for reference.
Those of us that work in universities will all know that we're collecting evidence of impact right now and how important that is.
I think another thing that's come up today is this idea of recording, you know, recording and saving archives,
how difficult it is for all of us to keep records of everything and make sure we keep hold of them.
You know, we heard that the signals archive was destroyed. I've heard of many archives being destroyed.
So these are some of the impacts, in a way, of all the people who work together with us at the time of the first conference,
publishing magazines and articles that were either devoted to women in photography or included interviews and discussions around our subjects.
The lightbox, she's also mentioned today, curated an amazing show on British women in photography.
It was beautifully done. And one thing in particular that I thought was really interesting is the contextual information that was provided,
especially in things like captions and the website was very, very important.
Natasha Caruana and I also. I'm smiling because this was quite, quite a thing.
We're invited to take part for several years in the photography show in Birmingham, and it's really a male dominated affair.
But we ran a women in photography stand and also had several speaking events there, which I think was important.
Several people started things because of what we were doing and involved us in it.
Pickfair run one or two, maybe even three women behind the lens competitions at the Tate Modern invited fun group to come and do a presentation,
which we supported Delphin for Windu had given a presentation at our Living Room funded research workshop in New York.
So that was also a really important moment in our research workshop in Lagos photo.
We applied together with the Lagos Photo Organisation to the British Council in West Africa for a fundamental shift scheme,
which included six West African photographers and two British women photographers that went on for a year.
And some of the work from that Charlotte younger Heather Agfarm at Fenosa,
Yvonne and Matt and others can be seen on our gallery, which is also on the website.
Also in Shanghai, Karen Noor and I had a wonderful two person show, another way of telling,
and the Bush council collaborated with us and with the Shanghai Centre of Photography to host a mentorship meeting for 10
emerging Chinese women photographers who then formed their own group inspired by this meeting called A Dream of Our Own.
And we then curated a show of this work for were invited to do that for the Look Festival in Liverpool.
And that was also down to Tracy Marshall. So finally then we proposed a third conference to Tate Modern, who brilliantly agreed.
We also Valot University Arts London again, and that happened in 2019.
And again, all of that is on on the website. You can listen to the recordings. And it's about a subject very close to all of our hearts.
And particularly I was talking about this this morning. How do women work?
It's a massive subject and there has to be masses of work that could be done on it.
Inspired by that, by the ideas for this, we work together with.
We were invited by catalogue journal in Denmark to do a special issue of of the journal, the magazine journal.
And that was given away at the conference, almost like a conference catalogue.
This is an image by Ga Ga Egill from India whose work we saw.
She gave us a gallery tour in the in the New Delhi leadership funded research workshop.
And we were also invited by talking culture.
This is this is actually the last issue, our issue myself, that Williams, Emerich, Hiver editors an issue, a double issue,
which is published online right now for women in photography, and the print version will be coming very soon.
This is as though you can see all the different aspects of our activity on the research page or our site.
And. I was really interested.
Again, another comment by Erica is that you need the right researchers and funding.
And I thought, you know, we've seen some really strong presentations today.
But one of the things I keep thinking about is the fragility of all this.
I mean, it's so amazing that some of these stories are being told in some of these archives have been saved.
But it's very fragile. It's there's nothing secure in it.
And I know that's true probably for the whole of British photography, in a way.
But it seems particularly pertinent to women's photography.
So also on the Web site, earlier this year, we had some funding from U.K., our eye, and we were able,
together with the support of our research office at UCLA, to develop a manifesto for women in photography.
And if you go to the website, you'll see this purple banner at the top.
And when you click it, you get to the manifesto. And again, it be fantastic if all of you signed it.
We need a lot more signatures. It's doing well, but we need more all the time.
And we hope to use this to campaign for further promotion of women's photography.
Further things for women in photography and other things on the website include an opportunities page,
which I'm totally invested in, and a journal page.
And anyone who has stories that they want us to feature or opportunity to advertise, please do send them to the fast food email address.
So what next? Well, it's a tough world, isn't it?
We all know that and I know other people were all applying for various fundings.
So we have several applications on the go and we have two new things that have been funded.
And so we're really excited that we can continue. It's very hard to continue.
And up and coming in June 2021 is our fourth conference.
Again, in collaboration with Val Williams at University of London and with Tbilisi Museum of Photography and Multimedia.
And if it actually if we're hoping to it life, well, we plan to do it live actually in Georgia.
And it'll be accompanied by a series of Night-Time projections in June will be summer.
So of be really lovely. And we've also formed a collaboration with Taslim.
In Doha, Qatar. And it's a three year partnership where we will initially run a research workshop in Qatar.
Or if not possibly in Qatar online, followed by a yearlong mentorship programme with emerging women photographers and Fastforward and the festival.
And then followed in 2023 by our fifth conference.
And as we slip in another one in between our fifth conference on women and photography.
Since.