{"id":70,"date":"2008-06-04T11:09:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-04T10:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aberth.com\/blog\/geoff-charles-welsh-documentary-photographer.html"},"modified":"2017-12-02T10:01:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-02T10:01:00","slug":"geoff-charles-welsh-documentary-photographer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.aberth.com\/digitalstorytelling\/geoff-charles-welsh-documentary-photographer\/","title":{"rendered":"Geoff Charles, Welsh documentary photographer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I met Culturenet Cymru’s Sioned Rhys Jones and Hawys Tomos at Eisteddfod yr Urdd, Conwy, last week. As part of the National Library of Wales and funded by Heritage Lottery and Welsh Assembly Government, Culturenet Cymru<\/a> is working on a project based in Aberystwyth called ‘From Warfare to Welfare’. There’re doing three things:<\/p>\n

1. helping people to make digital stories. Young people work with older people to make a digital story of 1939-1959 recollections<\/p>\n

2. staging multimedia conferences<\/p>\n

3. digitising photos by Geoff Charles<\/p>\n

I nearly fell off my chair when they told me about the Geoff Charles element. Geoff was a prolific Welsh documentary photographer. He took a photo of my brother and I around 38 years ago. There are more than 20,000 of Geoff’s photos held for safe-keeping at the National Library of Wales. You can see some of these at http:\/\/geoffcharles.llgc.org.uk\/<\/a>
\nHere’s the digital storytelling connection…<\/p>\n

When the Nokia N93 first came out around two years ago (in 2006), BBC Wales was interested in its potential as a tool for people to tell broadcastable personal stories. All the members of the Capture Wales team experimented with many forms. Some of these forms went on to be adapted for public workshops. One of the experimental digital stories I made wasn’t made for publication; it was intended to explore the phone’s still image and voice recording capacity in a digital storytelling context. The voice recording quality was OK but, as you can see, there’s some distortion of the images because I needed to take photos up-close. I haven’t made the story public until now. But because of this bit of Geoff Charles Culturenet Cymru synchronicity, I wanted to share this mobile phone story with you now:<\/p>\n