Walking the Work: Drop in on the ‘Holding Place: Dundee, Otherwise’ Exhibition

Dundee, Scotland, is a city shaped by continual transformation. As redevelopment reshapes familiar streets and neighbourhoods, former uses linger alongside new ones, and different histories and imagined futures sit together within everyday life. Holding Place explores what it means to encounter a city that is continually becoming rather than simply changing.

Working with Polaroid photography, the exhibition treats the photograph as more than a record of place. Each image develops within the place of its making, so the photograph emerges alongside the encounter rather than after it. The photographs attend not to transition itself but to the experience of inhabiting a city where change has become an enduring condition, engaging with the textures and tensions through which urban life is continually negotiated.

Holding Place is developed as part of the Misfiring Places research project, a collaboration between Dr John Post and Dr Neil Crawford, and considers photography as an active way of knowing, not simply a means of documentation. Walking the Work is an informal drop-in event to view and discuss the work, held during the Stirling Photography Festival, in collaboration between the Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy, the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, and the University’s Art Collection.

John Post is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Stirling. He holds a PhD in Art and Design from the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. He specialises in practice-led photographic research with a focus on queer visual culture, empathy, and digital intimacies.

Neil Crawford is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Politics and Public Policy in the School of Law, Politics and Social Sciences at the University of Stirling. He specialises in climate and environmental justice, forced migration, and urbanism.