Blog: Powerful personal stories in our new rural poverty premium exhibition

Over the past few months, citizens’ panel members from the Taking Action on Rural Poverty project have been working on a Photostories project, using photos and personal stories to explore the lived realities of the rural poverty premium - the extra costs, time and opportunities lost that come with living on a low income in rural communities.  

In June, we previewed the exhibition at the Royal Highland Show as part of a showcase on Community Wealth Building, co-ordinated by our friends at Scottish Rural Action. Panel member Jane Paterson and I had a brilliant day unveiling the images and stories on a wide range of topics, from the challenge of heating rural homes, to the value of community spaces, to the potential rural impact of changes to the Motability car scheme. We met Cabinet Secretaries and MSPs, spoke with rural organisations and talked to members of the public. There was a real buzz around the exhibition, and after being immersed in the process of creating it, we really enjoyed stepping back and seeing people’s responses. People told us how a particular image stopped them in their tracks or made them rethink their perspective.  

This week, we launched the full exhibition on my home turf, at community-owned arts venue Dunoon Burgh Hall. We’re excited to bring it home, and to have time and space to share it with many of the partners we’ve worked with over nearly three years of TARP: it will run as an exhibition in the main gallery for two weeks, before heading to Aberdeen Arts Centre and a parliamentary reception in October.  

The dispersed nature of our communities means the citizens’ panels have mainly worked online. A real highlight will be bringing many of the Argyll & Bute panel together in person to celebrate our work. Everyone is excited about sharing their stories. They are powerful, and some are a tough read. But they also bring out the personalities of the photographers, and the way things intertwine in small communities. They show how the person dealing with one problem is also the one holding things together for their neighbour, or organising the local singing group.  

It’s been an absolute privilege to work with the panel members as they swapped experiences, chose the stories they wanted to share and worked out how best to illustrate them. I was left with the odd feeling that it should be harder to find so many compelling stories about the impacts of rural poverty in our group of just 15 photographers. It should be a bigger challenge to ask people to open up about really difficult circumstances in their lives. That it was comparatively ‘easy’ speaks to how systemic the rural poverty premium is, and how motivated panel members are to help create positive change. Reflections on the project (which form part of the exhibition) reveal that working in a group provides a sense of solidarity and safety and a relief in seeing 'it’s not just me' as well as a desire to use bad experiences for good. 

Central to the Poverty Alliance’s approach is that participants build trust by working together over time, and choose what they are comfortable revealing. In some of the Photostories, the viewer may be left to wonder what’s happened for that person. Hopefully that opens the door to conversations, and to challenging assumptions we may not know we’re making.  

It’s so important that our work makes space for people to have this kind of agency. Time and again, we see how people amass expertise from navigating systems that don’t work. Being heard or highlighting issues is important, but for people to be able to share based on their experience – not just their experiences – moves further, towards advocacy, generating solutions and influencing. 

At the Photostories launch we’ll be sharing a report from our test of change project with award-winning energy organisation ALIenergy. It’s a great example of what we mean about using people’s lived expertise to create change. Panel members helped shape this project, which explored the value of bespoke advice-giving for social tenants who are navigating the transition to sustainable energy. ALIenergy worked with tenants who had experienced retrofitted green technology, such as heat pumps and solar panels. It’s a process that can have huge benefits for tenants, but the report highlights some systemic challenges with retrofitted heating systems in rural settings. 

Following on from this project and our discussions about it during our TARP sessions, panel members who have been through the retrofit process themselves are co-presenting the findings with us at the upcoming Scottish Ecological Design Association conference. Some will also form an advisory group for a new project by our Rights in Action team, which will further explore experiences of retrofitting for low-income households in rural Scotland. The new evidence will be used to create recommendations to reduce fuel poverty through retrofitting schemes that work for low-income communities. 

If you’re doon the watter come and see for yourself: Photostories: experiences of people living in rural Scotland runs from Tues 11th – Tues 26th August at Dunoon Burgh Hall.