Arts charity Photoworks is the only organisation with a national remit for photography in England. Our work is supported by public funding through Arts Council England’s (ACE) National Portfolio.
In 2023, as part of ACE's investment review, Photoworks received a funding uplift for Photography Champions, a programme to create new networks for photography and photographers in selected locations across England.
Photography Champions was developed as a response to challenges we faced as a small team with national ambitions. The idea was that the framework would help Photoworks deliver against its national remit, increasing audiences and levels of engagement through targeted but light touch activity at a local level.
Partnership work is at the core of Photoworks’ non-venue model. Our national work has been most successful when we have relationships with local communities, partners in place and people on the ground to sustain relationships.
Through this programme we’ve been engaging in depth with artists, organisations and communities in Portsmouth, Medway, Dudley, Blackpool, Barnsley and, more recently, Gloucester.
The model for the programme is simple. In each location we recruit a Photography Champion and allocate each one a modest amount of seed funding. We then begin to develop local partnerships and identified strategies for linking local activity with our national initiatives such as the Jerwood Photoworks Awards and the Photoworks Festival, which take place in different places and formats.
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Through targeted investment, each locally appointed Photography Champion has been supporting their communities to develop bespoke activity that works within existing local infrastructure and is responsive to local need.
The idea is to embed activity within the cultural landscape and provide added value, impact and support such as training and paid opportunities as opposed to seeking to access or put additional pressure on already stretched local resources. As part of this, we developed key partnerships with several community darkrooms and higher education institutions as well as galleries, museums, archives and arts venues.
The networks are intersectional and inclusive, seeking to engage people at all stages of their lives. Those taking part have included photographers and other creatives, teachers, academics, children and young people. We co-designed each programme with local steering groups, ensuring it met community needs and interests.
Photoworks has provided a framework, funding, and bespoke mentoring. The Champions and their communities have been deciding how best to activate that programme and shape activity. Photography Champions are creative freelancers, and very much part of the Photoworks team, linked in with our learning, marketing, comms and curatorial colleagues.
As each programme is entirely shaped by the people and organisations that are active in each location, the work on the ground looks very different in each place.
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In Dudley, a large market town in the West Midlands, there isn’t a large visual arts venue, or university acting as a hub for creative practice, but there are enthusiastic, emerging photographers coming out of Dudley College and support from Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The challenge is to support emerging artists to consider developing and sustaining a practice in their hometown, rather than migrating to bigger cities.
The development of the Dudley programme is supported by a steering group that includes the college, a local photographer and arts organisation Grain Projects. We’ve established the Dudley Photographers Network, which delivers portfolio reviews, artist talks, archive and exhibition visits alongside workshops focused on skills development.
In Barnsley the approach shaped up differently. Photographers in this market town, the fourth largest in South Yorkshire, told us they were keen to increase opportunities for platforming their work and that affordable studio space was hard to find, so we brought in the expertise of Kerry Harker, a curator and consultant who co-founded The Tetley in Leeds. Kerry supported a collective of local photographers to seek and secure meanwhile space for new studios.
Photoworks will be presenting the Photoworks Jerwood Awards (JPA) at Barnsley Civic in February 2026. We supported the Barnsley steering group to submit an ACE application for a new photography festival that coincides with the JPA exhibition, helping raise the profile for photography in the town. Alongside that there have been artist talks, school workshops with built in professional development and mentoring for emerging artist facilitators and a research partnership with Leeds University exploring the barriers facing Barnsley and Leeds photography graduates as they enter the sector.
The programme’s impact has been evidenced through outcomes grouped around increased opportunity, upskilling, resourcing and partnership development. We have helped broker new partnerships and relationships across the photography sector but tried to keep focus on strategies that can sustain activity once the uplift funding ends, particularly around fundraising.
The programme has successfully leveraged additional investment for creatives, young people’s programmes and festival activity via ACE, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and local authority sources.
Most notably, the programme has helped secured significant ACE funding for a new community darkroom and engagement programme in Portsmouth. This is now feeding into its bold plans for City of Culture in 2029.
Juliette Buss is the head of learning and engagement at Photoworks. She is also founding co-director of Corridor, an organisation connecting artists, people and places through lens based participatory projects. Buss, a trained artist and art teacher, is a recipient of the Marsh Award for Excellence in Visual Arts Engagement, part of Engage's Extend Leadership Programme alumni, co-chair of Trustees for Ffotogallery in Cardiff and recipient of the inaugural RPS Award for Photography with Young People (2025).
