Exhibitionism with Unseen Tours
Unseen Tours is a social enterprise that’s based in London, and there couldn’t be a better partner with which to launch my first photography exhibition. A social enterprise is, in lay terms, a charity that makes money and reinvests it back into the organisation. In this case, Unseen Tours trains people who’ve experience of homelessness to be tour guides of their local area, and it was recently their 15th birthday. I was delighted to support them with the anniversary celebrations to create a travelling exhibition.
Unseen Tours has trained and helped 35 people to co-create their own walking tour route; currently there are five routes across some of the most popular areas of London, including around London Bridge with veteran guide David, and also in Westminster, St Pancras and Clerkenwell, Canary Wharf and Brixton. These are walking tours with a different flavour: apart from seeing the city from a non-conventional perspective - it’s amazing the details you can find in a city as rich in history as London, and helping some of those who have experienced housing difficulty, the tours cast light on other unseen aspects of life with no fixed abode. For homelessness isn’t just about living rough on the streets: sofa surfing and living from hostel to hostel also play a large role in housing insecurity, and are underreported from official figures.
From a personal perspective, I enjoyed meeting and getting to know each guide. When we refer to others in categories (“the homeless”, “black people”, “the far right”), we start to lose sight of individuality, peoples’ likes and dislikes, their skills and talents. These tours bring the “small peoples’ stories” to life, and show that struggling with permanent accommodation can happen to anyone. We have the multilingual Ben who likes to sing Brazilian songs to the guitar, Rah who knows more about the history of the London Underground than anyone I’ve ever met, Anne with her beautiful singing voice, and so on…
I shadowed all of the guides as they conducted their tours, creating documentary images: some candid and a number of more posed shots. We wanted to portray the tours as realistically as possible, with minimal processing and cropping. These were to be displayed on four-sided self-supporting panels - one for each guide and an additional stand for Unseen Tours itself. I shot on digital medium format for this reason, keeping focal length consistent with a 63mm lens. This turned out to be a wise decision, as our first venue to debut the exhibition was the Art’Otel Hoxton: there are huge walls in their gallery space onto which the images and moving footage were projected.
We were delighted with the opening turnout of over 100 people, we had tunes from Loop dee Loop music, the drinks were flowing courtesy of our Better Green Living sponsor - and the feedback has been strong. TripAdvisor has been kind enough to support Unseen Tours all of the way through this project.
The exhibition remains on until the end of Sunday 29th March 2026, and it’s free. If you have a spare moment and want to know more, it would be great to get you and your eyes on the images!
And of course, if you would like me to help with any non-profit, NGO-type work, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.