Faith in Suburbia Photography Project

Today we're in the Shri Kanaga Thurkkai Amman Hindu Temple in West Ealing which was one of the temples that was included in the Fath in Suburbia photography project. "My name's Claire Dwyer, I'm a senior lecturer at UCL in the Department of Geography where I'm also part of the migration reseach unit and so i've been, over the last few years, looking at changes in suburban landscapes, particularly in relation to faith and migration. For the photography project I recruited six different faith communities, all in the Ealing area; two churches, an Anglican Church - St Thomas' Church, a Catholic Church, the Hindu Temple that we're here in today, the West London Islamic centre which is a Mosque, and the Gudwara, the Sikh Temple and the Ealing local Synagogue. We decided we were going to focus on senior citizens - we thought they'd have interesting stories to tell and are perhaps a kind of neglected group in relation to outreach and participation, and we thought they would also be a way into getting other people in their community involved, so we recruited six individuals from each place of worship. "My name is Ramachaneran. It's opened my eyes in so many ways because I was blind to other religions, but then I went to the Mosque and to the Gudwara and I was able to understand their faith, why they believe in it, and at the end of the day everything comes to charity - they want to help people, younger people and older people - everybody." We worked with a photographer, Liz Hingley who is well known for her work, particularly in relation to migration and faith (Liz Hingley) "I think photography is more than just the photo - it's a whole process and a whole experience. A lot comes out of the process of taking photographs, the exchange in building up to that the relations you have to build to make that exchange, the understanding you have to make the more people you're sharing that experience with, and you see what other people are drawn to the more you learn yourselves. From the first occasion when everybody was very shy about taking photographs and really unsure, and didn't feel they could do it - wanted me to take them - which I refused, by the end we couldn't stop them taking photographs and had so many to edit" (Claire Dwyer) People when they were looking at the pictures said, 'I chose pictures that showed similarities between the places of worship, so the use of lights for example in different places of worship.' Somebody else said that when she approached the Hindu temple there was just so much colour and diversity that she decided to pick on one thing, so she took pictures of animals, taking the detail of different animals in some of the many statues and fabrics in the Hindu Temple. So we had a workshop where people selected images and then from those images we produced the exhibition. One of the reasons why I did this project was it's very much my local neighborhood and these were faith communities, some of which I knew a lot about some of which I didn't know so much about, and I hope that the longterm impact of this project will be more connections and opportunities to build better interfaith networks locally. Ealing is a very thriving, diverse multiculatural place, and i think by looking at the faith communities that was a way in to telling that story. I think it's been really great to do something different to what I've done previously in my academic career. Like a lot of geographers I often talk to people, interview them, but actually using photography was a great methodology for getting people to tell me about the significance of different religious places or religious practices.