In what turned out to be a very timely talk, photographer Jim Holmes gave a members zoom talk for Brighton & Hove Camera Club entitled ‘Dedicated to all marginalised people worldwide‘.

I had literally just responded to Exercise 3.3 – Reflection, which asked about the ways in which
marginalised or under-represented people or groups could be badly or unhelpfully portrayed and how using an insider might help combat this?

Jim Holmes (website link) is a British / Australian documentary photographer who has spent many years working worldwide focusing on individuals and developing communities mostly in the Middle East and Asia. He lived in Vietnam, Laos and Japan for more than 20 years.

He says:

Social and economic development issues  are told through the lives and lifestyles of the world’s marginalised people, bringing their situations and struggle to light. Current topics of health, child protection, WaSH, education, infrastructure, agriculture and fisheries are illustrated through the prism of emerging climate change issues  affecting communities and economies.

https://www.jimholmes.co.uk/about

see Jim Holmes’ images on his website: https://www.jimholmes.co.uk/archive

during the talk, we saw documentary images taken in Burma, Cambodia, Mongola and Aceh, which were taken for organisations like UNICEF, Oxfam, WHO etc. It was very obviously from the way he spoke that Holmes was really passionate about the people he photographed and had lived in the region for many years. However, having considered marginalised groups for exercise 3.3, it struck me that he was a western photographer taking images for large organisations. One telling remark about one image was “that’s an Oxfam picture”. It made me think how much of the photography was to meet the brief of the organisation commissioning him and for a western audience.

What seemed to be the most authentic images, were the ones, Holmes said he had taken ‘after the work had finished’. He spoke much more passionately about these images but explained that none of the organisations commissioning him would ever buy or print those images. That made me feel sad, we have only seen them because he brought them to a private camera club.

Holmes said he did quite a lot of research into the people and areas he went to and the resulting images are really engaging and well composed,. However, I wondered if local photographers who were ‘insiders’ in the community had been hired to take the images, would they have a different feel and focus.