If I were to choose how I’d like to be described, alongside ‘photographer’, I would choose ‘storyteller’. I don’t use this word lightly and I appreciate it has become more in vogue in recent years, adopted by many practitioners, researchers and artists. But for me, storytelling holds so much curiosity, possibility, connection and magic. This is what I enjoy and anticipate each time I hold up my camera.

A charity I’ve had the honour of working with over the past few years is the National Literacy Trust (NLT). The first time I was invited to photograph one of its events was very special. It was to celebrate a newly developed library at a local primary school. I unexpectedly felt a connection between me photographing a story about the day, which itself was themed around books and storytellers. I was able to show a part of an organisation dedicated to empowering people of all ages to improve their literacy skills.

Libraries for Primaries was founded in 2021 by the NLT, of which Her Majesty Queen Camilla is patron. The campaign brings together charities, publishers and businesses to address the lack of investment in primary school libraries, particularly in the UK’s most disadvantaged communities where one in four primary schools doesn’t have a library. By working within these schools, the NLT helps to give each child a voice in telling their own stories, in all kinds of ways.

It was at this first event that I learned I would also be photographing Queen Camilla. A high-profile event such as this means a high-profile calling of press photographers and journalists, ready to fast-track their images and words to news outlets ahead of the event finishing. As I lingered a few moments longer,

I saw not only a queen, with an impeccable demeanour, greeting and conversing with the school community, authors and dignitaries in her role as patron, but I also saw a mother and grandmother, whose face genuinely lit up when engaging with the children, recalling with them precious bedtime stories read with her own family.

At these school events I met my own family’s literary heroes: world-renowned authors such as Cressida Cowell of How to Train Your Dragon and Jeff Kinney of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, along with the inspiring Children’s Laureate of Wales (2021–23), poet Connor Allen. My mind filled with memories of bedtime stories with our teenaged daughter, when we’d put on voices and act out swooping dragons from these books. We read these classics on a night-time loop, until she was able to read them for herself.

And here I was at this event, reliving those magical early years of reading to her, through photographing some of the library spaces being created in these schools.

Reading is not just about receiving stories from the pages of a book. It can be expressed in so many other ways. I experienced this first hand recently when photographing a theatre group who collaborated with the children from a Swindon primary school. That wonderful phrase ‘from page to stage’ was brought to life as I watched them create a play from a storybook, interpreted their way. The room was filled with method actors making each character their own. All the while, they boosted each other’s morale throughout these sessions to the final performance.

Then there are the special, unplanned moments – like being introduced to the schools’ wellbeing dogs, and listening to children read passages of their favourite books to the very authors who have written them.

At each of these NLT events, I see storybooks spring into life. At the last one, this happened in the style of a game show in a south Wales valley primary school, hosted by none other than author and illustrator Jeff Kinney. He was en route to the Hay Festival where he was giving a talk, and had offered to spend the morning with a school close by. Fingers on the buzzers, amid shrieks of laughter, this became a quick round of Diary of a Wimpy Kid scenarios as teachers had to act out crazy scenes and test out their own book knowledge.

With the help of many cross-sector partners, the NLT has transformed 1,000 primary school libraries to date. Together with partner support, it has gifted hundreds of thousands of books. It means that children, like the ones I’ve met, get to read of mystical adventures in faraway lands, or discover characters within the pages of books who are not dissimilar to themselves. That is truly the magic of storytelling.

 

For more information about the Libraries For Primaries project and the charity’s other collaborations, visit The National Literacy Trust

This story features in the Late Summer issue of Juno Magazine