Community Portrait

BCA and Fujifilm have provided participants, through artist led workshops, the opportunity to produce individual portraits to produce a Community Portrait exhibition. We have worked with local photographers and The Higgins Bedford to take portraits of people within our local community not often seen in portraiture. We’ve run workshops in schools, community setting, Bedford College and The Higgins using the latest FujiFilm cameras as well as traditional and historic photography techniques like Cyanotype and glass-plate photography, with artist David Loney. We produced over 1,000 photographs to choose from for the exhibition.

The exhibition features over 200 portraits of Bedford locals taken by local school-age children, Bedford College students, community groups and professional photographers, creating a ‘Community Portrait’ of the town. It explores the history of photography from 1840s glass-plate techniques, through to current digital techniques, and onwards towards to a potential future involving AI. It showcases the Bedford community through their own portraits, whilst inviting the viewer to reflect on the art of image-making through the decades and beyond.

Participants were inspired by visits to state-of-the-art facilities, the latest technologies provided by Fujifilm House and their own relationships and connections in the community.  They learnt about the local heritage of photography and the links with Fujifilm who have be present in Bedford and a key employer over the last 40 years.  

Not only does the exhibition feature traditional photography, but it explores the dramatic shift in traditional mediums to the use of AI, with AI exhibit ‘J.E.S.S.’ (Just Exploring Systemic Stereotypes) created by artists Arnab Chakravarty and Fergus Laidlaw.

J.E.S.S. is an interactive installation that sparks curiosity and invites playful, hands-on exploration of how Al models interpret people. Situated within an exhibition exploring photography’s evolution, the installation invites viewers to interact with nostalgic tools — a hybrid of a projector and a scanner. Participants select photographs of the local community taken by human photographers and feed them into the machine. An Al image-to-text model translates the visuals into words. It displays them on a monitor for visitors to read. This collection of disconnected phrases and isolated terms then serves as a prompt for an Al text-to-image model to try to recreate the photograph.

This step-by-step conversion process-image to text to image-reveals stark contrasts between human and machine perception. It invites participants to examine the Al’s interpretation closely, exposing biases and stereotypes in its language. As viewers observe this process across various photographs, they begin to see how Al describes images and how its language choices shape the look and expression of its creations. The installation encourages viewers to reflect on this transformation and share their thoughts using pen and paper.

In our current cultural and media landscape, where Al tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others are being used more frequently to represent our ideas, dreams and aspirations, J.E.S.S. prompts viewers to engage in a critical examination of the production process behind these images. By highlighting the differences between human-created and Al-generated imagery, the installation challenges us to question the role of Al in visual representation and to demand more thoughtful and responsible use of these powerful technologies.

We showcased J.E.S.S. at the BEYOND 2024 conference in the Immersive Futures Lab, giving those at the conference the chance to engage with J.E.S.S. and explore the systemic stereotypes of AI themselves.

I’m blown away by… a computer from Bedford called J.E.S.S. which stands for Just Examining Systemic Stereotypes, these people are making me feel so seen – using tech for heritage decoloniality and political female empathy! They are going above and Beyond what people think we can do with technology like Jay Taylor’s description of small music venues to underfunded communities…

Artist, Producer and BEYOND poet-in-residence, Keisha Thompson, weaved her observations of Day 01 of the BEYOND 2024 Conference into verse, to provide this wonderful closing poem.

J.E.S.S. is available to tour from March 2025. If you are interested in utilising J.E.S.S. to examine portrait exhibitions and question AI stereotyping, please email us at: info@bedfordcreativearts.org.uk.

To complement the exhibition, we will also be holding a symposium event, Community Portrait: Reprint Revolution, on Tuesday 14 January 2025, to explore AI and community image creation: questioning the reimagining and reinterpretation of community images and the dramatic shift from traditional methods of photography.

The Community Portrait project is in partnership with The Higgins Bedford. It is sponsored by Fujifilm Bedford and is supported by Wixamtree Trust and The Steel Charitable Trust.