Plymouth photography exhibition celebrates major crowdfunding success — with more donation appeals on the horizon?
A beautifully curated exhibition of photography works taken by amateur snappers in Plymouth was held in the city at the end of January in celebration of a successful crowdfunding campaign by local social enterprise Fotonow.
Plus, members of the Fotonow team have told Plymouth Culture that they are weighing up whether they will do another round of crowdfunding over the next couple of months to make sure all their community photography groups keep producing outstanding images like the ones on display at the exhibition throughout 2025.
Fotonow’s Crowdfunder Celebration Exhibition Event took place at St Saviour’s Hall, opposite Plymouth’s Royal Citadel above the Barbican, on Friday 31 January. It was a one-day pop-up photo exhibition which also included a short show with art sessions for kids the following day.
The aim of the event was to show the public the great photography work that Fotonow, a Community Interest Company (CIC), has been doing with its community groups over the past nine months, however it was also organised to celebrate the organisation’s crowdfunder campaign that was a financial success last year.
A total of £35,000 was raised in February and March after donations came in from hundreds of people, businesses and organisations to help support Fotonow’s work with community groups that specialise in socially engaged creative media projects across the city.
Six community groups on display
Matt Pontin, Fotonow’s creative director and a seasoned photographer, said: “Following our crowdfunder success, we have been running community projects using photography for the past nine months, so we had six of our community groups all showing their work at the exhibition.
“We hit a point last year when a lot of our funding came to an end and we had these community groups that we wanted to sustain. We weren’t getting any success with our major funding applications so we decided to just put it out there and ask people to support us — and they did.
“As well as all those generous donors, Plymouth City Council and Sovereign Network Group also gave us some money and we raised, in total, £35,000. That has helped sustain Emma Booth, our community photographer, and her role along with our work with the six groups for almost a whole year. It was fully appreciated and has allowed these groups to continue.”
Pontin said the family-friendly exhibition was a ‘total success’ and that St Saviour’s Hall was a ‘really good space to play with’ and was a ‘perfect place for this type of show’. He said: “Way back when social enterprise was becoming a thing, we set up Fotonow as an artist-led collective to do social engagement photography projects.
“Here we are 15 years later with a staff team of 11 working in Plymouth on creative media projects, photography, film and a lot of creative arts projects for social purposes as much of our work focuses on teaching people how to do media such as photography.”
Pontin added that the event also saw Fotonow — which has a diverse team of photographers, filmmakers, educators and media practitioners in its ranks — ‘reflecting on a bustling year of socially engaged photography work across Plymouth’, ‘celebrating the collective achievements of those who we have worked with by coming together in sharing the amazing stories, voices and creative outcomes of our participants’ and ‘bringing our community together for inspiration and connection in 2025 and beyond’.
Magical memories
The six community groups on show at the exhibition included the Foto Drop In and Foto Memory Café club for budding older photographers based at Moments Café, a social enterprise for ‘people to meet, eat and socialise’ in New George Street. The Memory Matters group has been going for nearly three years now and brings the city’s senior citizens together every Monday morning to catch up, share their photos and plan their next shoots.
John Parsons, who lives in Plymstock, is an amateur photographer who says the group is founded on community. He was at the exhibition and said: “Everybody knows each other and I’ve learned so much about photography since I joined. The community element — we come from all over Plymouth — is an important part of the group.”
The 85-year-old had two pieces of his work up at the exhibition. The first was a grand image of Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina that he took in 2011. The other was a beautifully atmospheric photo taken in 2018 in Uganda in front of a cave. A woman — his friend — is in the centre of the frame and he says she had never been to Africa before despite being of African heritage. “I was introduced to the group,” he says, “because I’ve always had an interest in photography and I haven’t looked back since.”
The other groups with works on show at the exhibition included Crescent, a self-referral women+ photography group based at Plymouth’s Ocean Studios in Royal William Yard that meets every Thursday. Plus, there was Unlocked Youth, a group for 13 to 18-year-olds who work with Fotonow to improve their creative media skills every Monday at Ocean Studios.
Also represented was the International Photography workshop group for refugees and asylum seekers. Workshops were run from The Box museum and art gallery every Tuesday in September, October and November last year. Plus, the Photo Wellbeing Walks group that worked with Plymouth’s Odils Learning Foundation last summer also had images up on the walls. The group also comprises asylum seekers and refugees who have been ‘connected to Plymouth’.
The other group involved in the exhibition was SEND Youth, which supports young people in Plymouth’s special educational needs and disability (SEND) community with mentoring, inspiration and creative media activities.
“Diverse and incredible”
Emma Booth said: “All these groups are about engagement, skills-based learning and confidence building. They often include people who are socially isolated, so they add a real sense of community for anyone who joins us. Fotonow offers help with photography and film — and the exhibition showed how diverse and incredible the work these people create can be.
“We are so grateful to all those who donated to Fotonow during the crowdfunding campaign. If we hadn’t got that money then we would not have been able to run these projects and groups — it’s as simple as that.
“It gave us practically a year of funding and we were so pleased to put the exhibition on and show members of the public the inspiring photographic works that these groups created as a result of their donations.”
Booth said the event ‘was about bringing together all of Fotonow’s community and celebrating everyone’s working achievements with all group members and the public too’. She said: “It was actually the first time that all of the groups had come together to meet each other and see each other’s work — a cross-pollination of all the creatives.
“The works on show were only a really small percentage of all the works done by these groups over the past year but there were some amazing pieces on the walls. It was a truly inspiring showcase of community and photography in Plymouth.
“We are now considering another crowdfunder over the coming months so that we can do the same again for all of these groups in 2025. Please see our website and social networks for news on this. If it wasn’t for the generosity of our donors, partners and sponsors, these community photography groups simply wouldn’t be able to flourish.”
To find out more about Fotonow and the community groups — including details on how to join them — head to the Fotonow website: here.
