Over the last few months I’ve been slowly getting my head around what happened last year when I applied for, and received, my first Arts Council grant to run some photo walks in Birmingham. I went in to the process as someone who was probably capable of being an artist but didn’t have the confidence to call themselves an artist. I came out of the process as someone who, when asked by the registrar what to put in the occupation box on his wedding certificate last month, said Artist.
In March I half-joked that I’d got so much stuff in my head that I needed to write a book to get it straight. And then I looked at the sketchy notes I’d written and realised there was a book there. So I wrote it.
The book is called Collective Photography and it’s free to read/download in various ebook formats from Leanpub. (You can pay for it if you like but there’s no obligation).
The meat of the book is 10,000 words long, which isn’t that bad, and I’ve tried to keep it light and readable. It’s not the evaluation report, though I did need to write the book to get my thoughts straight for it.
The rest is a huge slab of appendices including blog posts, the funding application, questionnaire answers and a couple of interviews. You don’t need to read these unless they’re of interest.
Amongst other things I’m hoping this book is useful to other people like me who might not come from an art-school background and want to see how the Grant for the Arts process could work for them.
Please note that it isn’t 100% finished. I will be taking on board some feedback and tweaking the text in places, as well as adding some images and the evaluation over the next few weeks. I might even ask someone to do a not-shite cover! But if you go through the Leanpub process you’ll be notified when updates are available. I’ll also extract some of the newer pieces for this blog.
Please do let me know what you think of it and, for the next few weeks anyway, any comments on improving bits.