Some cities is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) founded on a passion for the power that photography has to be a bridge between communities. We work with individuals and organisations to create high quality training, publications, seminars, exhibitions and inclusive participatory photographic opportunities.

The company grew out of many conversations with cofounder Andrew Jackson concerning our respective practice as photographers working in Birmingham and our desire to know the city through our lenses. We started with a simple question, emerging from the challenge of our ambition, that asked: if we, as individual photographers, can’t hope to map the city in photographs in anything even approaching completeness, could we find ways to get closer to covering its territory by drawing others into collaboration?

We’d meet and develop our approach to realising this goal, over beers or coffee, often at the ‘lucky table’, an odd one out of those at the Edwardian Tea Rooms at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. We’d part and go hopeful on our separate ways when new ideas came to us or when potential partners had been identified and expressed an interest in collaboration.

One of the prompts to map the city in photographs was the recognition of its changing nature – apparent in large-scale building developments impacting in turn on demographics, culture and community. Thus, we turned to consider issues of past, present and future. We looked to who, and what, was represented in the photographic archives of the city and anticipated the changes that were likely to come to pass presently that might shift or erase communities before their moment and ‘passing’ could be recorded. In tandem with this archival work, we viewed the accelerating profusion of images created on camera phones and shared on social media as a daunting and exciting challenge to what we’d thought we did well as documentary photographers. We asked whether there was a way to synthesise what we considered our informed, professional practice with the perspectives and outputs of others like us: students and enthusiasts, novices and casual users of photographic technologies.

For me, the foundation of the Some cities approach lay in further reflections on the challenges of being a photographer and one’s connection with place and the subjects one finds there.