Hackney Museum is currently showing "100 Years and Counting; Helping People into work since 1910". Photo: Theocharia

On 1 February 1910 Sir Winston Churchill visited three newly opened ’Labour Exchanges’ – forerunner to the modern day Jobcentre – in Hackney, Stepney and Camberwell.

A century later, Hackney Museum is set to honour the role played by these Exchanges in helping people into work through a new exhibition entitled: “100 years and counting: helping people into work since 1910”.

Churchill, who was then President of the Board of Trade, was well aware of the need to combat rising unemployment in Britain at the turn of the 20^th century.

“These Labour Exchanges are a piece of social mechanism and are, I believe, absolutely essential to any well-ordered community. The exchanges I have visited today are all painted green which, I believe, is the colour of hope,” he said on that first day in February.

He went on to emphasize the need for a collective effort, which would bring together people seeking work and employers looking for workers. The matter took on even greater urgency in the years that followed, with two world wars leaving over one million people unemployed, according to exhibited texts.

During the course of their existence, the Exchanges changed names three times. They were renamed Employment Exchanges in 1916, before finally being relabeled Jobcentre in 1973.

Exhibition visitors can see a reconstructed Labour Exchange office, the front page of the February 1910 Daily Mirror, and black and white pictures loaned from the People’s History Museum of Manchester that authentically recreate the era.

The exhibition at Hackney Museum carves out a historical journey, charting the transformation of the exchanges from social hubs where jobseekers would spend a great deal of time sifting through vacancy cards, to the computerized self-service network we have now. Jobcentre Plus is currently said to receive over one million online job searches daily.

The exhibition is being held at Hackney Museum in partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions and will run until 6 March.

Ceramic Shoes by Jenny Stolzenberg Photo: Marion Davies

The innumerable works of art in Germany commemorating its absent and lost after the holocaust are the themes of a new photographic exhibition at Croydon Clocktower, called Absence and Loss/Forgive and Do Not Forget.

Space C Gallery hosts the work of the award-winning photographer Marion Davies and of ceramic artist Jenny Stolzenberg and creates a context for the Holocaust Memorial Day celebrated yesterday.

Artist Jenny Stolzenberg creates glazed and fired ceramic shoes: replicas of the footwear left behind by holocaust victims when the concentration camps were liberated. The artist said: “Shoes are very evocative: they can tell us so much about the owner. In many accounts of survivors, there is invariably a story about shoes: they cause pain, infection, death and, occasionally, and more happily, they saved lives”.

The ceramic shoes are placed in the centre of the Gallery whose walls are filled by the photographs of Marion Davies. Davies’ black and white pictures compose a photographic journey to contemporary Germany through the art. It pays homage to a vibrant part of her community, lost forever after Hitler’s rise to power.

The first part of the exhibition presents pictures of the Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: “Illustrating how absence and loss can be represented in architectural form”, as Marion Davies says. Fragments of Jewish life and achievements before 1933, is the title of the second part. The Neue Synagogue in Berlin can be seen in this part, now a memorial museum and library, which used to be the largest synagogue in Europe with almost 3000 seats.

It is not only the Jewish community that was excluded from German society in Nazi Germany. Black people, Sinti, Roma and homosexuals, were all victims of National Socialism. Twenty thousand black people were persecuted by Nazis and an estimated 500,000 Sinti and Roma died between 1933 and 1945 in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Fifty thousand homosexuals were imprisoned. A commemorative plaque, situated near the location of the raided bars and cafés where homosexuals used to frequent is captured by Marion Davies in the fourth part of the exhibition, which commemorates these persecuted communities.

The last section, entitled One Person Can Make a Difference, pays tribute to the bravery of thousands of anonymous people across Europe who helped and saved the persecuted. Here we see a British spy, Mr Frank Foley, who worked in the British embassy in Berlin during the 1930s as a passport control officer. This was a cover for his work as an M16 secret service agent. Through these two roles, Foley saved at least 10,000 lives through issuing visas, forging passports and papers, thus enabling Jews to escape to Britain and Palestine, as the text accompanying the picture of his memorial informs the visitor.

Marion Davies mentions that: “One of the lessons of this exhibition is that integration cannot be taken for granted…I therefore hope that through engaging with this work, visitors will be more willing to confront the dangers of discrimination, prejudice and extremism”. For those who will not be able to attend the exhibition, the work of both artists can be also accessed on the following websites: http://www.mariondavies.co.uk/ and

http://www.jennystolzenbergceramics.com/

Exhibition ‘Sights Unseen’ Photo: Kyriaki Theochari

‘Frozen moments’ of their daily life, captured through sensory photography techniques, is what blind and visually impaired Africans and Afro-Caribbeans of South London, share with us in the exhibition ‘Sights Unseen’, hosted at the Association of Photographers Gallery in Hackney.

Gary is a blind man who lives in Lambeth. Quite often in the past when coming out of his house, he stumbled across a car parked on the nearby pavement. As he states: “Walking around it in the road, I became frustrated”.

So he photographed the car and placed the photo on its windscreen with an explanation of the problems it caused him. His neighbour has since parked on the road.

Gary is one of many the blind and visually impaired in the Afro-Caribbean community of south London, who have been trained to use sensory photography techniques to communicate their experiences.

Sensory photography workshops taught them to use senses , such as their hearing, touch and smell, other than sight to create images. The workshops held by the UK- based international charity Photovoice, took place at the Organisation of Blind African and Caribbean, between November 2008 and November 2009.

Photovoice helps marginalised and minority communities around the world to communicate their reality, and advocate social change through photography. It was their training that materialised the fascinating images showcased at  the exhibition.

Their pictures highlight the dangers that people with sensory and mobility disabilities, face in their daily lives. They are their medium to call for action. The ‘seeing world’ does not realise, how many  simple things like the carelessly managed roadworks captured in a picture, can pose danger for those who do not.

The exhibited works also raise awareness of how prone people of  Afro-Caribbean origin are to blindness. The participants of the Photovoice project use their photographic skills to promote the campaign ‘Believe your eyes’, which suggests regular eye check-ups to prevent sight loss, one of the commonest causes of disability in the UK.

The exhibition offers us the opportunity to understand the power of photography from another angle: what matters is not just the image itself, but the experience and the emotions inspired within the photographer.

In the text accompanying a photograph of Althea titled ‘Self-portrait with flowers’, reads: “Before this project, I have never took any notice of flowers. But since this project, I have come to like flowers for what they represent. I have been blossomed just like a flower. It is like a change, the way flowers as a seed grow little by little, that is almost how I see myself in this project. I have opened up to see, without having any sight.”

Both photographs and texts can easily be accessed by visually disabled people, since MP3 players, available at the reception, provide descriptions for each photograph. Caption plaques in Braille and the tactile diagrams are also available. The exhibition ends 23 January 2010.

Rwandan genocide exhibition in Tower Hamlets. Photo: Kyriaki Theochari

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide is the theme of the exhibition “Heroes of our Time: Rwandan Courage and Survival” at Oxford House in Bethnal Green. The walls are filled with photographs and testimonies of four  survivors of the genocide: Simeon Karamaga, Daphrose Mukangarambe, Cassien Mbamba and Ange Cendrine Mukayites.

Each portrait, taken by photographer Andrew Sutton, of the survivors of the 1994 slaughter is accompanied by a written testimony of their harrowing experiences. Daphnose Mukangarambe lost her five children and her husband during the genocide, leaving physical and psychological scars  easily discernible on her portrait. She is blind in one eye. Since then, released prisoners have confessed to killing the inhabitants of her town and told her where her two older children are buried. She explains that she cannot get over the grief and sorrow of losing her children. She says the scars on her face are the legacy of the genocide, which she sees everytime she looks in the mirror.

The exhibition is backed by  Tower Hamlets Council and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

David Russel, director of SURF, the charity which helps survivors of the genocide, said  it was important to that society learnt from crimes against humanity to help communities live peacefully in the present. He emphasised the importance of such exhibitions for ethnic minorities living in Tower Hamlets and elsewhere in the UK

The last part of the exhibition shows the humanitarian work of SURF, which helps survivors based in Rwanda and UK to rebuild their lives.

The pictures by photographer Andrew Sutton are the fruit of ten years’ labour, they were presented two months before at LSE, and are now hosted at Oxford House until the end of January.