Some thoughts on the photo competition

Wonderful space. Cool gallery with cool staff. Unafraid of democratic photography unlike many establishments up themselves. - Stuart S

This quote from the Fabrica comments book back in April during the Anish Kapoor show really struck me. I love reading the comments book, I love that direct and generally unframed feedback. It's been knocking around at the back of my mind since then and came to the front when I started thinking about the idea of a photo competition. The full rules are on our website but it's essentially very simple. Take photographs of the current exhibition, The Elephant Bed, choose up to three to enter and put them on Flickr, tagged, so we can find them easily. We'll select a winner at the end of the show, who'll get a £50 Amazon voucher and a selection of the entries will go onto our website and eventually form part of our online archive. We will also select an image to use on our New Year card.

I wanted to keep the rules as simple as possible in order to keep to that low barrier to entry principle that I think is one of the most useful and interesting aspects of social media.

One of the guiding principles for me in this work I'm doing is to discover ways of encouraging dialogue with our audience, of encouraging them into a deeper engagement with Fabrica. We've known for some time that people take photos in the gallery and that many of them end up on Flickr, we often look at them but we've never, with one exception, commented on the photos or tried to establish any kind of relationship with the photographers. This now seems kind of foolish for all sorts of reasons. The one exception was in 2006 when we used an image we found on Flick for our New Year card. As is our policy we credited the photographer after seeking his permission to use the image. The image is below and was taken by Danny Hope (yandle on Flickr).
I hope and believe that the photo competition will deliver a number of benefits to Fabrica, to the entrants and to the wider audience and at a minimal cost-

-Encourage dialogue
-Open up the organisation
-Encourage the entrants to have a deeper engagement with Fabrica
-Allow our audience to create content for our website
-Allow us to see the exhibition from different perspectives
-Allow the entrants to have a creative relationship with the gallery
-Encourage the idea that we're interested in a creative response from our audience
-Give us a bank of images for our online archive that go beyond the relatively straight documentation that we now have
-Increase Fabrica's reach and online presence

I could go into a lot more detail on these things but I've given myself a 500-word limit for each post and I'm already nearly there. I'm hoping that all these benefits, which in many ways encapsulate a lot of the aims of this work that I'm doing, will be discussed in more detail in later posts.

I launched the competition a week ago and with five weeks to go we've had some great entries and I'm looking forward to seeing more. I'll blog about the outcome at the end of the show and whether I feel the competition has delivered what I was hoping for. Or I might pop up with the odd update between now and then.

Damn - I just went over my limit.