OFFERING a unique insight into the travelling community past and present, a photographic exhibition set to launch at Hereford’s Courtyard Centre for the Arts next month will take you inside what has traditionally been an intensely private community.

In the early-1990s girls from two local travelling sites, in Bodenham and Lyde, were given cameras and took hundreds of photos documenting in intimate detail their lives, and the lives of those around them.

A selection of those pictures will be exhibited alongside a recent collection taken by professional photographer Elisabeth Blanchet under the title ‘Then and Now’.

“The original photos are quite moving, quite telling, quite unique,” said Julie Coleman, of the Rural Media Company.

“Because of their inside view, you see the community in a way that isn’t often represented.”

The exhibition coincides with the November 13 launch of a new website for the Travellers’ Times, the only national publication for the 300,000 Travellers, Gypsies and Roma.

The Travellers’ Times editor Damian Le Bas will be on hand to talk about the publication and the project that led to the initial collection of photographs.

The magazine, which is published by Hereford-based Rural Media Company, also managed to track down the subjects of each original, black and white photograph – and all of them are going to attend the opening night.

And the hope, Ms Coleman added, is to recreate some of the pictures taken 20 years ago.

Mr Le Bas, and Romany Gypsy and Oxford graduate , has been a strong advocate for using the magazine to give people from the travelling community a voice.

Working with Rural Media Company, he has pioneered training skills working in and out of schools to help give young people the media skills to tell their own stories.

Ms Coleman said: “There is a feeling that reality shows like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding have set the community back about 50 years.

“They have not been well-received by most of the community.

“The worst thing is that those programmes are presented as factual documentaries – with serious voiceovers – when in fact most of it is a fictional programme.”

The exhibition will be at the Courtyard from Novemeber 13 to December 7, and the launch night will feature a screening of ‘An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker’, a new Roma film and a Q and A Mr Le Bas.

To read more on the Travellers’ Times website, visit www.travellerstimes.org.uk/ .