Wakefield College News

Photography competition opportunity

Photography competition opportunity

by Claire Simpson-Griffiths -
Number of replies: 0

 

 

The Leeds Centre for Dante Studies, in collaboration with the Education Department at Wakefield Cathedral, invites the submission of photographs on the subject above, as part of a project on Dante and the idea of community.  Photographs will be displayed on the Centre’s website, and selected entries will be displayed in an exhibition in the Cathedral in May.

 

Dante is known for his Inferno, and for the strap-line: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter…’.  Perhaps less well-known is the fact that he described both Hell and Heaven as cities or communities.  Hell is a city gone wrong, a city devoid of community, where it’s every soul for her- or himself.  Punished cheek-by-jowl in a situation of squalor and violence, the souls feel  deeply alone, cut off from hope and from one another.  In Heaven, on the other hand, the idea of community is taken to its ultimate fulfilment.  Heaven may not look like a city – Dante’s Heaven is made of pure light – but it feels like one, and a perfect one at that, to the souls who enjoy its peace, harmony and understanding.  Between Hell and Heaven, Dante situates Purgatory: a place where souls are re-educated and learn to live together, to support one another, to create community.

 

Dante was writing over 700 years ago, but his ideas about what makes a community ‘good’ (heavenly) or ‘bad’ (hellish) still resonate today.  How might modern-day Wakefield be either heavenly or hellish?  How are its citizens working today to create community so that they can live together in peace and harmony?   Can you capture your sense of what Wakefield is, or could be, as a community in a photograph?  If so, we would love to receive it.

 

We would like you to send your photographs electronically (preferably as a .jpg file) to Simone Lomartire (s.lomartire@leeds.ac.uk), clearly marked ‘WAKEFIELD’, by midday on Friday 29th April.  Include your name and anything you’d like to tell us about your image.  We will contact you to let you know whether your image has been chosen to appear on the website or in the exhibition.

 

The exhibition will be in place in the Cathedral between 9th and 27th May, and will set the images alongside extracts from Dante’s text, and poems inspired by Dante and written by local poets.