The Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh has a reputation for producing and presenting some of the best in new drama. This year marks fifty years since the theatre opened its doors in 1963 and to mark their anniversary the Theatre has offered 50 writers a year long attachment to the Traverse. Writers were invited to take part in a series of tailor-made writing events throughout 2013, including panel discussions and workshops. The year-long attachment will culminate in a new writing festival featuring some of the work developed by the Traverse Fifty throughout the year. At the end of the process three of the writers will be offered seed commissions.
To help support this the theatre took on fifty photographers each with the brief of producing a portrait of one of the fifty writers that they would be paired with and which would ultimately form part of an exhibition later in the year as part of the anniversary celebrations.
I was teamed up with Alison Carr. Alison is an award winning writer based in Newcastle and after I was put in touch with Alison we made contact and managed to get together and arrange a bit of a photo-shoot in Newcastle. Whilst the final picture that Alison and I chose for the exhibition in a couple of months must remain ‘unseen’ until then some of the other pictures from the shoot are below.
I’d like to say cheers to Alison for being a good sport and for putting up with my “can you just go here” and “can we just go over there” requests as I searched for possible picture opportunities as we meandered through Newcastle and hopefully the portrait will work well for the exhibition.
Alison’s Website and work can be seen by following this link.