What are YOU going to do?

Quentin Ball

I am a member of a peace and justice group which meets monthly. We discuss appropriate topics. An overlying theme has been how are we going to 'celebrate' or mark the Millennium. There has been much said about what should be done, like cancelling Third World debt, for example. But when it comes to something tangible that 'I' can do, as an individual, the ideas disappear.

I also belong to LIP. We are a product of London, one of the world's great cities. Another common thread is photography, which in its most basic terms, really is about capturing moments in time on silver halide. That's what we all 'do'. It's our passion.

There you have it - London, capturing moments, passion. How can we combine these three aspects into something meaningful for the Millennium, something 'I' can do? Do we have a choice but to assist in making a record of 1999, the last year of the decade, century, millennium?

With just over a year until 1999, it is time to start gathering members together and getting the show on the road. At the AGM, most of the 25-30 members able to attend thought the proposed Millennium project was sound, logistics aside (there was a lot of debate about how it would actually happen, details - significant but not insurmountable). The Committee will decide at their next meeting whether to approve it.

Members considering taking part in the project should consider that at the moment, with no sponsorship, all costs for materials, etc. will need to be covered by themselves. It will cost you time and money. But for anything worth doing, that is usually the case, is it not?

So what now? If the project goes ahead, it could be not only one of the most important projects LIP has ever undertaken, but could even end up being the unique photographic record of London on the threshold of the next 1,000 years. What an opportunity for all of us to be part of photographic history.

So... what are YOU going to do?

Editors comment

As I understand it, two committee meetings have already decided we should go ahead in principle with this project even if no sponsorship is available. What the committee have to do is to confirm this by setting up the mechanism for it to happen. For those not at the AGM it is currently envisaged that the work from the project will be selected to give a picture from every day of the year which would be shown both on the World Wide Web as new daily picture in the year 2000 and also as a physical exhibition with perhaps 50-100 selected photographs and the remaining days as smaller reproductions - and hopefully a printed catalogue.


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