Dafydd's new project and Kickstarter campaign

Dear all,


we'd like to let you know that 50% of the*kickplate*project, Dafydd Williams, has started raising funds for his project in Naples - building an 8" by 10" camera and using it to document the lives of Sri Lankan community in Naples.

My project is to spend 2 months photographically documenting the Sri Lankan community in Naples, where a large proportion of the estimated 80,000 Sri Lankans in Italy have now settled; many moving there during the 25-year civil war and after the devastating tsunami of 2004. I would like to capture the daily lives of the Sri Lankan community; at home, as they work and how they interact with their new city – and through a series of reportage photos and portraits show how the Sri Lankan community has managed to thrive in Naples. 

As part of the project and as a camera-maker I would like to first build a camera – an 8x10” analogue field camera – for this project. The camera will allow me to use the new Harman Direct Positive Paper (a paper specially made to produce positive images) to create one-off prints that wouldn’t need printing or enlarging like a normal negative. I will also be using the smaller field camera I built (as can be seen in the film) to shoot instant images and smaller film negatives.

Once I have completed the photo series, I would like to use these images to curate an exhibition so I can share the experience and lives of the Sri Lankan community. Hopefully shedding some light on how it’s possible to re-create the feeling of home in a place that can sometimes feel hostile.

I hope that with the techniques I use, these images will give a unique insight into the people who have travelled so far and carved out a space of their own. I’m not usually a documentary photographer and normally use photography as a more conceptual medium, trying to photograph what isn’t there so much as what is directly in front of the lens. And it’s in this way that I’d like to work in Naples.

My goal isn’t to just catalogue the lives of the Sri Lankan people here, but to hopefully capture life in the way that we don’t always see when we are looking directly at it. Using the experimental and alternative techniques I would normally use in my photography, I’d like to add an extra dimension to the images, to not only present the world as it looks to the eye, but to give each image a beauty that could stand on its own.

You can find more information about it here, it comes with a short film about Naples - we would greatly appreciate your help and sharing a link to the project on your blogs and pages. Thank you very much for your support!