Curated education project
Site Gallery, Sheffield
Families of Steel was a collaboration between Site Gallery and the Magna Millennium Project which brought together school groups and members of the steel working communities, with photographers Jane Sebire and Clive Egginton, to produce a series of portraits of steelworkers and their families. The aim of the project was to give young people the opportunity to find out more about their local heritage and to encourage individuals from the Steel Industries to play a part in recording their own histories for future generations.
Photographs produced during the project formed part of an exhibition at Site Gallery, and a large scale public siting in which the images were displayed on massive billboard hoardings throughout Sheffield and Rotherham during May 2000.
4 schools from Sheffield and Rotherham took part in a series of workshops at Site Gallery and at Magna. The aim of the workshops was to encourage these young people to begin to think about their local heritage and about the process of recording history. They were given the opportunity to work with professional photographers and were introduced to portraiture through practical workshops using large format camera equipment and through reference to other photographers working in this area.
The actual portraits of the steel workers (seen in the exhibition and on the poster sites) were taken by the the young people from the schools on location at the old Templeborough Steel works in the heart of the regions Steel making community. There was plenty of opportunity for the steelworkers and their families to share their stories and for the school groups to ask questions about life in the steel industry. This process of discussion and conversation between the steelworkers and the school groups had a massive impact on the way in which the young people perceived local heritage and history, opening it up out of the archives and enabling it to be seen as a living process. It also enabled the steelworkers themselves to play a key role in telling their own histories, ensuring that their industry, their lives would continue to be made visible to younger generations in the future.
