Schools' Workshop: Archive Portraits

About

Using portraits in Autograph’s archive collection as a starting point, this two-part workshop invites students to explore how histories are collected, shared and created through photography.

Various dates are availble from September to November. Find out more and how to request a workshop on Autograph's website.

These workshops are suitable for KS2 and KS3.

Taking place within the context of your school, the first workshop will be centred around transforming the classroom into a pop-up exhibition using portraits from Autograph’s Exhibition in a Box and Archive Learning Resource. Students will write and discuss their intuitive responses to the portraits, listening to and interpreting the images. Students will work together to find thematic, historical and conceptual links between the portraits and will take ownership in curating their own mini-exhibition. Their discussions will be the basis of justifying their creative decision-making in curating the portraits.

After the introductory session, Autograph will leave the display up in the classroom, inviting you to engage with the photographs independently with your students through a series of prompts.

The second workshop will take at Autograph 2 - 6 weeks later. Moving beyond discussing and analysing photographs, this session invites students to think about their own identities through a series of practical activities. They will explore self-representation through self-portraiture, still life and writing. Students will consider the choices they make when asked to self-represent and self-express through these three forms. Students will work collaboratively, using the portraits from Workshop 1 as a jumping board, to think about how their self-representations could be articulated as part a wider expression of their local community and its history.

This workshops will ask:
How do we read portraits and what do they tell us about the sitter?
How do you curate an exhibition and what choices might a curator make to link images thematically together?
What does it mean to articulate oneself through portraiture and how would you choose to portray yourself?