The ‘Flash Swap’ was the group’s first publicity event, intended to raise the profile of their campaign for a dedicated photography gallery in Birmingham.

Although hidden away in a dark corner of the Custard Factory, it was well attended. All the walls of the spacious gallery were adorned with photographs brought along by the visitors.

The exhibition grew throughout the day as people brought along their photographs. Then at five-thirty Patrick Wilcox, founder of Birmingham Photospace, gave an introduction and started the swap.

We had all been given one sticker for each photo that we’d brought, and could use these to claim photos of a similar size and quality from someone else. Although there were reports of people removing stickers or covering someone else’ with their own, most people behaved themselves.

I came away with three photographs: ‘Luminarium‘ by Julia Gilbert, which was taken inside an exhibition at Birmingham’s ArtsFest; ‘Mondrian was here‘ by George Daley, taken behind Five Ways shopping centre in Birmingham; ‘Crazy Paving’, also by George Daley, taken outside The Public in West Bromich. (The former two are displayed on this page.)

I took a few for swapping. I know the two of my cat Pepper were claimed, and I think the one of the deck chairs may have been too (all three are displayed on this page).

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I was chatting to a bloke at Tuesday’s Birmingham bloggers meet who seemed to be suggesting that the university is opening up a photography gallery in Eastside (I think he even said Curzon Street Station).

If this is true, should we:

• leave it to them;
• try to influence it;
• keep going regardless?

I’ll try to find out more, but if anyone can shed more light on this please let me know.

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• started tagging/labeling/categorising all my relevant posts with both brumphotospace and brumimagecentral (I’m adding ‘brum’ to the beginning to minimise the danger of duplicate, unrelated tags elsewhere on the web);
• created a Yahoo! Pipe to pull the various feeds (eg Flickr discussion, this blog, the calendar) into one place; if you know of more let me know and i’ll add them. (RSS)
  • this is a very simple mashup, all it does is pull in the feeds and spit them back out as one (in alphabetical order); please re-use it if it’s of any use to you.

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A quick look at the Charity Commission website suggests that we don’t need to register as a charity if our annual income is under £5,000. I think that means we can start gathering donations straight away, and start the process of registering while we build up momentum.

As for holding money, I’ve discovered the Co-op bank’s ‘Community Directplus‘ account:

• we can hold up to £1m, at which point(!) the bank would help us decide how to move forward;
• there is no minimun deposit;
• we would need to provide:
  • a written constitution (half A4 is enough), signed by
  • at least two members, by whom the account would be held (they don’t all need to be signatories).

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As a result I prgmised to do a couple of things, forgetting that my broadband is down. Doh. So I’m writing this VERY SLOWLY on my phone, with very low signal. Oh well.

There were only three of us at the meeting so it was short and productive. I agreed to:

• Explore feasibility of setting up a charity, and alternative routes for raising capital;
• Contact existing photography galleries for informal advice.

I shall post my findings on this blog and a link to them on the flickr page.

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