Winner of a coveted Irish Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) Award, 'Best Exhibition' at the prestigious Event Industry Awards, and a Silver Shark at the renowned Kinsale Sharks International Creativity Festival in 2017.
IN SIGHT is a unique photography project highlighting the issue of homelessness in Ireland through the lens of those who have experienced it first hand. Over the course of 12 months, 45 disposable cameras were handed out to members of Ireland's homeless community who were asked to take pictures that tell their personal stories of homelessness. Photography training was provided from a top Irish street photographer to help them on their way. The results were striking, thought-provoking, beautiful, sad, humorous, eye-opening and everything in between. A month long exhibition of their work was held in Powerscourt Centre, Dublin in May 2016. Photographs were on sale at the exhibition to raise funds for the Dublin Simon Community to help combat homelessness in Ireland.
A second outdoor exhibition 'IN SIGHT OUT' took place on the railings of St. Stephens Green for 2 weeks in November/December 2016.
Since then the project lives on at www.theinsightproject.ie where you can see all the photos taken during the project, read about the backgrounds of some of our participating photographers and the stories behind their photographs, and if you would like to do so, purchase an IN SIGHT project image for your home or business. All proceeds go to Dublin Simon.
Project
IN SIGHT Photography Project
Background
IN SIGHT is a personal project conceived of and ran by a good friend Lynsey Browne and myself. Having worked together in various companies for a number of years we often talked about using our skills in marketing, advertising and design to do a personal project that was meaningful to us and that could do some good. Stemming from an idea we'd talked about a few years before, and given the critical issue of homelessness in Ireland at the moment, the IN SIGHT project was born. Our aim with the project was to use photography to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness and in the process raise funds to help the cause in a concrete way. To give ourselves the best chance of success, we felt it best to align ourselves with a homeless charity so in April 2015 approached the Dublin Simon Community, one of Ireland's largest homeless charities, with our idea, and they were very happy to take part. With their help we were able to reach out to people who used their services to ask them if they would like to be involved. The Capuchin Day Centre, another homeless charity in Ireland doing amazing work, were also very helpful a bit later on in letting us spread the word to people who visit their centre too. In the end 45 people took part in the project.
How It Worked
IN SIGHT is an independent project, and as such has no company or budget behind it. It was brought to life with the help of many generous partners and sponsors that came on board at different points along the way. These individuals and companies were instrumental in enabling us to make this project happen and we are hugely grateful to them all. We were blown away by the generosity that was shown from people and companies offering their time, expertise and/or products and services when we needed it. For example:
Des Byrne, founder of the Irish Street Photography Group, gave a series of photography classes to our participants.
A generous stranger heard about our project and bought 30 disposable cameras online and sent them to us. Fujfilm Ireland then also donated a further 20 cameras at a later date.
Mahers Photographic, Drogheda, developed all our cameras and printed all the photographs for our exhibition.
Production company Motherland, created a powerful video (involving voiceovers from some of the project participants) for us to help promote our exhibition and project.
Powerscourt Centre donated their gallery space for almost the entire month of May.
A full list of all our amazing sponsors and their contributions can be seen on our website.
By working closely with our partners and sponsors we were able to deliver an exhibition and project worthy of the people taking part.
'Fantastic Exhibition! Just goes to show you don't need an expensive camera to take interesting photos.' - Anna O'Rourke
'Thanks for the amazing exhibition, I was really impressed. The photos seem important and relevant.' - Adrian Robb
'Went to see the IN SIGHT exhibition last weekend...touching to see these photos taken by people that are homeless. I encourage you to go see it.' - Art Craft
The Exhibition and Launch
To showcase our photographers work a month-long exhibition took place in May 2016 in Powerscourt Centre Dublin. To raise awareness about the issue and the exhibition we put a full PR and marketing plan in place to help make sure we had a high attendance at the exhibition launch and ongoing throughout the month. This plan kicked off at the beginning of April with the release of our IN SIGHT video (created by Motherland) which was watched and shared thousands of times in the fist few days alone. Following this we continued to build our IN SIGHT community on our social channels Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as secured high profile coverage in the national and local media including:
2 page spread in the Irish Times newspaper
Article on TheJournal.ie
Article on Newstalk.ie
TV appearance on TV3's Weekend AM
Radio interviews on the Ray D'Arcy show and Dublin City FM
We also had numerous mentions on blogs, newsletters and online publications such as Irish Photo News, Loving Dublin, Dublin Event Guide, and many more, as well as retweets from some high profile personalities like Glen Hansard, Alison Comyn, Anna Daly, Grainne Seoige, Rosanna Davison, and Victoria Smurfit.
All of this exposure was fantastic and helped massively towards helping us achieve our goal of raising awareness about the issue of homelessness in Ireland and funds or the Dublin Simon Community.
Photos from our launch event in Powerscourt Centre, kindly taken by photographer Brendan Duffy, can be viewed here.
Since then, to raise further awareness and funds, we had a second exhibition in Dublin City Centre, outdoors on the railings of St. Stephen's Green, which took place for two weeks from Nov 29th to Dec 12th 2016.
This exhibition helped raise more awareness for the project and cause, helped along by a follow up article in The Journal, as well as many other media and social mentions.
We were also delighted that around the same time one of our photographers images, 'Me, Myself and I', was chosen for the front cover of the book 'Looking At The Stars'.
Also a series of photos from the project were selected to be used in renowned Irish singer Mary Coughlan's music video for her powerful and moving song 'Nobody' in aid of Focus Ireland.
This was followed in early 2017 by experiential activity on the streets of Dublin, at the exact locations where photos from the IN SIGHT project were taken. Copies of the images, along with their descriptions and the cameras used to take them were hung around the city allowing passers-by to look through the viewfinder and experience what the photographer saw and possibly felt for a moment in time.
Ongoing
You can keep up to date with the IN SIGHT project on our website www.theinsightproject.ie where the full range of photos from the project can be viewed, and on our social media channels Facebook, Instagram and twitter.
Please also consider purchasing a photo on our website to help raise funds for the Dublin Simon Community. The photos are excellent quality and look great framed as some of our previous customers have let us know:
'I was really happy with the print. But framed it looks even better!. I love the idea behind it.' - Petra Bangermann
'Received my IN SIGHT photo in the post today. Thanks very much.' - John
'As someone who has a long history and experience of visual communication and as an artist, I would like to convey my thanks to the photographers. I spend a lot of time thinking about and seeing visual projects all over Europe. I was really impressed with the high quality of these images.' - Adrian Robb
My Role
Concept, Identity, Branding, Creative Direction, Art Direction, Design, Copywriting, Project Management, Sourcing Sponsors & Sponsor Relationship Management, Marketing, PR, Event Management, Social Media Management, Fundraising, Sales and Fulfilment ...all with Lynsey Browne.