Next Saturday an exhibition called The Lived Experience of Addiction opens at Dublin 8’s Copper House Gallery featuring photographs of deceptively ordinary, unexpectedly moving items and landscapes.
The exhibition is spearheaded by sociologist Dr Maria Quinlan and visual artist Patrick Bolger using a method called Photovoice. They worked with the families of addicts, recovering addicts and people in active addiction all connected with the Merchants Quay Ireland drugs service, who took photographs that represented their personal stories and wrote accompanying paragraphs to explain them.
“Photovoice was designed by two American researchers in the 1990s,” says Quinlan. “They were looking at women’s experience in rural China. Rather than layering a lot of analysis on other people’s experience, they just gave them cameras and asked them to document their own lives.”
Quinlan and Bolger have previously run projects like this around childhood sexual violence with One in Four and homelessness in consultation with homeless families and service providers. It has a joint therapeutic, research and advocacy purpose, says Quinlan. “I think the impact is the people who have taken part in these projects are much more open and less shameful of their experiences.”
Source: Patrick Freyne, The Irish Times, 2/03/20
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