Guest Speaker: Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz

She is a documentary photographer based in London, working on assignments and commissions. Her work has featured in print and online publications. Today she comes to give us an early career perspective.

Hanna presented us her work-in-progress project, European Green Belt. It follows the route of the former iron Curtain and connects national parks, nature parks, biosphere reserves and transboundary protected areas as well as non-protected valuable habitats. The idea came from a podcast she heard. Her interest in landscape, human stories and war already existed for the project to commence. She travelled from Norway to Lithuania and has completed half of the Green Belt so far for the project. She likes to have this human encounter with the narrative by photographing images that feel as if you are in these places. Her photographic eye is drawn to shapes and colour. Photographing on a medium format camera, Hanna only likes to take one shot and move along (except for portraits). I don't necessarily do that within my own work but I find it an interesting way to photograph and perhaps the better way. She highly recommended that we find project partners when creating work. If travelling or needing permission to go places to photograph the job can become expensive. Therefore she approaches those that have links into her work for hope that they will fund her. For the European Green Belt project she partnered with The Photographic Angle, The RPS, British Council and Parks & Wildlife Department of Finland. 

The next project she presented to us is one that has been completed and exhibited. I Feel Every Stone of the Road is psycho-geographical. She re-traces the sites of prisoner of war camps where Hanna's Polish grandmother was held in 1944 by Nazi's. She visited Poland, Germany, Holland and Belgium. From the stills that she took she put together a moving image piece. It featured her grandmothers journal which she had at the time and Hanna's own that she'd been writing during the project.  She wanted to present memories within the content by bringing to life something from the past. 

She wanted to bring this intimate experience to her exhibition, with that she had large scales projected onto material and headphones for viewers to pick up and listen to. The sounds during the moving image piece were various recordings she done herself. There was also something called piana showpan? I believe she said it was when they play the piano and take certain sounds out? I'm not so sure but the recordings and voice over worked really well with the images and the narrative. Again she mentioned project partners: Ideas Tap, Polish Ex-Combatants Association of Great Britain, Dziennik Polski and Posk. In search of partners she recommended to us this website that she uses to help her find those that link in with her work. www.turn2us.org.uk 

To help give us an early career perspective, she told us about how to make a living as a photographer. There were things that she wishes she was told back when she started out in photography and wanted to share with us... 

• The quality of your work is important. You need to keep it consistent throughout websites and make sure its professional by proof reading texts. 
• Be innovative! 
• Reach out to people you want to work with and for. 
• Accept any and all photography work (weddings, headshots, editorial, NGO's)
• Get a part-time flexible day job within the field of interest that can compliment your practise and pay bills. Link in with artistic vision
• Give yourself creative space, read a book/ watch a film
• Collaborate!

She runs Photo Scratch, a bi-monthly night for documentary photographers to show case work-in-progress projects at Hotel Elephant Gallery in London, SE1. She told us to get in contact once we have graduated, however at students we are more than welcome to join for discussion but not show work. It's free participation and free attendance.