About
Picnic is Hastings’ first physical community photography space, providing a permanent place for photography related inspiration, learning, opportunity and support. Open to the public Tuesday and Thursday, Picnic offers a growing selection of photo-books from publishers including Thames & Hudson, Loose Joints, Mack and Steidl. Titles are wide-ranging and include everything from Fine Art photography, to street, landscape and youth culture, alongside classics from the likes of Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka.
The library is open with the help of local volunteers, many of whom are photographers themselves, or who have a keen interest in photography.
In partnership with local organisations such as The Refugee Buddy Project, Xtrax and Eggtooth, and with funding from ACE, Picnic also offers a workshop program for children and young people, facilitated by guest photographers and artists including Maisie Cousins, Annie Collinge, Clarisse D’Arcimoles, Jason Evans, Guy Bolongaro and Eddie Otchere.
Picnic enables Stop Look Listen, the CIC set up by Nick Ballon, Georgina Cook, Alma Haser and Joe Charrington to work towards the company’s mission of promoting visual literacy among children and young people, and to put St. Leonards-on-Sea, and Hastings, on the map as a place for photography.
Reflecting its name, Picnic is a place in which the photography community and the local community can meet and contribute towards a shared interest in creativity and learning.
Meet the Team
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FounderNick Ballon is a documentary and portrait photographer, whose Anglo-Bolivian heritage is an important source of subject matter and inspiration in his work, exploring socio-historical ideas of identity and place, the concept of ‘foreignness’ and belonging.
His work has been exhibited internationally including at Rencontres d’Arles, Beijing Triennial, Guernsey Photography Festival, KK Outlet, Wellcome Trust, and NCM/Foyle Foundation, and received an honourable mention for the Photographic Museum of Humanity grant.
In 2013 he self-published his first book Ezekiel 36:36 which looked at the curious and precarious existence of Bolivia’s national airline, which received much critical acclaim and was one of TIME’s best photo-books of 2013.
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Photobook Library and Festival Creative Director
Joe Charrington (b.1999) is Picnic’s Librarian and an East Sussex born photographer.“The land woven beneath our feet is seeded with stories, tales and secrets. Using the locations of folklore and tales of yore as geographical underpinnings Charrington’s photographs explore the land and the modern day dwellers within it occupying a liminal space between present and past.”
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Founder
Alma Haser is known for her complex and meticulously constructed portraiture, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art.
Expanding the dimensions of traditional portrait photography, Alma takes her photographs further by using inventive paper-folding techniques, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue around her subjects; manipulating her portraits into futuristic paper sculptures and blurring the distinctions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery.
Alma has won many awards for her work, including Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award in 2013 for her Cosmic Surgery series (also the basis of a successful self-published book project). Her piece The Ventriloquist was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide and recent venues have included the 2017 Saatchi Gallery show From Selfie to Self-Expression. Examples of her work are currently on show at the Now Gallery in Greenwich, London.
Picnic is a non-profit organisation so we are always looking for new volunteers,
please contact us if your interested.
studio@pic-nic.uk