Alicia Bruce: On collaboration and advocacy
In this episode, we talk with Alicia Bruce on collaboration and advocacy. She explores how a collaborative approach to photography can avoid misrepresentations and can counter typical media narratives. She also discusses her involvement in campaign-based photography and the empowerment that can come as a result of telling hidden stories in an ethically-aligned way.
What does photography ethics mean to Alicia?
“Ethics, for me, it’s a reflection of personal values. And its respect, integrity, compassion, and care. Ethics are different from laws, I would say. There’s things that you can do legally, but it doesn’t mean you should do them. It’s about having good intentions and also being open to sometimes having those challenged as well because we’ve got ethics in the here and now, but we’re always growing and changing, and our ethics should as well. But, for me, it’s alaso about treating everyone the same.” (32:14)
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Alicia Bruce is a Scottish working-class artist, photographer, community collaborator, educator and activist. Her photography sits between documentary and staged imagery. She is interested in local and global communities and aspires to tell humane stories of people and place, often looking through the history of art for visual referencing. Within the communities Alicia documents, she is interested in environmental issues, human rights, equality, feminism, politics of space, territories and heritage.
Her photographs are held in several public collections including National Galleries of Scotland, University of St Andrews, and the UK Parliament, among others. Alicia's first monograph “I Burn But I Am Not Consumed” (Daylight Books, 2023) documents sixteen years of Donald Trump's impact on a coastal Scottish community. Her recent exhibitions include “LOVE: Still Not the Lesser” at Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and “[Re]Source” at Lishui Museum, as part of the Lishui Photography Festival in China.
All of her commissioned work is directly linked to her practice and values, often involving charitable campaigns or political organisations for exhibition and publication.
Alicia is also a Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and she is the Founder of Portobello Photography School.
You can see her work at https://aliciabruce.co.uk