We hosted a workshop. Scholar Asif Shakoor in conversation with Dr Georgie Weymss discussing forgotten seafarers from South Asia. Lashkar.

This project looked into the British Empire and the role of South Asian Seafarers. Through a creative walk, led by Asif, we explored the history of areas like the Royal Docks, the role of Lashkar, and their place in academic research.

At UCL Marshgate, we screened Stranger’s Home, 2021. This documentary is a helpful resource to raise awareness about a history that was not well documented. A lot of the relevant monuments no longer exist, and documentation of this history was not prioritised, despite the efforts of the seafarers during the great wars.

After watching the film, we walked over to UCL Poole street for a Q&A. Dr Georgie Weymss has supported Asif Shakoor in academic settings, as an academic ambassador and friend. Her research explores notions of bordering, legislative laws, and dual concepts of invisibility. For instance, she talks about the bordering existed inasmuch as it involved seafarers travelling across the borders to enter the UK, as well as the limited labour upon their arrival where they could only work along the borders of the docks. Her writing can be found online and is very much worth reading further, as our description only scratches the surface of a very deep tunnel of knowledge.

Our second edition of New Alterations brought together new faces from across disciplines, glasses of house pinot grigio in hand, gathering around audiovisuals that turned to movement, activism, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. The evening opened with Nuotama Bodomo’s Boneshaker (2012), which places a nomadic family at its centre. Told through the eyes of a young girl born into a life of endless journeying, the family, dressed in their Sunday best, search for spiritual awakening. The blessings of Jesus Christ rise in chorus with words spoken in tongues, the ale-sheh-ku-bakoos swelling to a crescendo as olive oil from the Virgin Mary touches their foreheads. This surreal vision, perhaps echoing Nuotama’s childhood, has the quality of a coming-of-age tale, as though revelation is imminent. Instead, it leaves us in a space of uncertainty, with more questions opened than answered. The short film can be viewed on Nowness.

With the atmosphere set, we shifted to Lydia de Matos’ Sex Drive/Deathdrive (unreleased), shared through a password-protected Vimeo link. This dance film explores movement through sharp, minimal editing choices that insist on economy. A single spotlight transforms a bedroom into a stage, its corners becoming sites of disappearance and return. Our events create space for filmmakers to discuss their practice, and Lydia spoke about her performers moving with the intention of being edited. Their gestures were not confined to the language of dance alone, but entered into dialogue with the camera. Cuts track the body as it vanishes from the light, slips out of the frame, and exits through a darkened doorway that at moments resembles the edge of the screen itself. Shot in 4:3, the chosen ratio strengthens this illusion. The production spanned two days, one for choreography and one for filming, with post-production ongoing. Lydia also described her use of data-moshing, a process that disrupts digital files and distorts pixels, the technological equivalent of scratching celluloid. Here, Python was used to manipulate the data of the MP4 file, creating a raw digital texture.

The programme continued in Lafayette, Louisiana, guided by a voice in darkness. A southern accent, soulful and searching, draws us in as Aunt Bobbi recalls her love of reading, a hobby that planted the seeds of escape. Wessley Edmonds’ she knew me before i was born (2025) is a work of personal reflection, an homage to her mother’s late teacher. Aunt Bobbi’s words reveal a restlessness: she was never ‘happy living in Louisiana’. This longing sits in contrast to excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), where naming, identity and intersectionality expose the weight of oppression on the Black community. Morrison’s misnaming of characters and her use of repurposed names demonstrate the power of identifiers in shaping autonomy. Edmonds pursues similar questions through film. The signifier of her name becomes a vessel for attachment, anchoring intimacy through distance. Aunt Bobbi dreams of leaving Louisiana, a desire that extends her autonomy beyond the self, even in the face of community resistance. The film withholds visual imagery for the first minute, a gesture of restraint. Once images appear, they show family photographs and domestic interiors, echoing Aunt Bobbi’s memories. Gradually, the focus shifts from the household to the wider world. Louisiana has long been home to some of the highest poverty rates among the Black community, and to ‘Cancer Alley’, an 85-mile corridor of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. Edmonds’ camera begins inside the home, then looks outward to reveal the systems that weigh on it, sketching the long struggle of the Black community against exclusion from White America.1

Watch Film

The evening closed with Great Okusun’s Incarcerated Roses (unreleased), which confronts the UK police system and its treatment of Free Palestine protestors. Composed as a rapid montage of mixed-media footage, moving from camera to phone, the film propels viewers into the immediacy of protest. Okusun, an emerging documentarian, spoke of the challenge in handling such emotionally charged material. Hours of raw footage had been cut down to a five-minute extract, an act of distillation that shaped fragments into coherence. After the screening, the audience reflected on the symbolism of house arrest imposed on one protestor, a gesture that collapses the distinction between private and public confinement. The film, still in its earliest stages, retains the roughness of unpolished rushes, yet its urgency and intent were unmistakable.

New Alterations remains committed to creating space for emerging filmmakers. At whatever stage a work finds itself, from raw footage to refined edit, we welcome it. With time, with conversation, and with a glass of wine, we aim to support the practice of filmmaking. Cinema is consciousness, and we strive to be conscious viewers of it.

A hands-on workshop where participants created soy wax candles while engaging with stories of social justice campaigns and memorial practices. This workshop transforms a craft activity into a meaningful act of commemoration and solidarity. It was hosted in-person at Rich Mix in East London.

In the distant land, horns toot as vibrations from sanai echo across the empire. Noise is one way to separate the west from its foreign counterparts. The Song, 2022 by Bani Abidi shows this concept well.

In our latest event, we screened The Strangers Home, 2024 by James King, a film commissioned by Thames Festival Trust. It deserves the big screen and surround sound—an eerie mood swept viewers into a world shaped by identity, censorship, and fake news.

One moment that stood out was a simple newspaper cutting, now a powerful node in the symbolic order crafted by the ‘other’ to present South Asians as lesser-than. It showed an abstracted group of global majority children, captioned:

The great majority…of the children…are of every conceivable hue

Originally published in a national newspaper, this cutting highlights how media participates in knowledge production—framing and shaping reality.

I’ve experienced something similar. During an interview at my youth centre, we spoke about class, gentrification, and community resistance. But in The Guardian, my words were reduced to the headline ‘gangsta’—a lazy stereotype, flattening us into the tired narrative of Black kids not working.

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Through this work, we’ve gathered cultural leaders from East London—representatives from SOAS, Museum X, UEL, UCL, and local groups from Tower Hamlets and Newham. It was a profound moment of generational knowledge-sharing. Elders broke bread with younger generations. We plan to keep building in this spirit.

The walking trail took place in the Royal Victoria Docks. While heritage protections remain, only two landmarks connected to South Asian histories have survived. A bitter reminder came at the trail’s end—a walk to a phantom landmark, empty of meaning.

We must acknowledge the work of Johnny Ringwood—an advocate for dockworkers and their stories. I received news of his passing today. Rest in Paradise. He played a key role in commissioning Les Johnson’s Dockers sculpture, which still stands in front of the Excel building. While it sheds light on aspects of the docks’ history, it leaves out South Asian workers—underpaid, overworked, and largely forgotten.

This conversation is one of heritage. South Asian seafarers deserve a protected landmark in the Docklands. One existing gesture is Lascar Avenue, which presents the illusion of heritage. In the image below, we find its Urdu root—Lashkar. Scholar Asif Shakoor has called for the road sign to be changed, restoring the word before it was anglicised into Lascar.

During the conversation, Dr Georgie Wemyss introduced a set of useful books which extend the discussion:

1. Ayahs Lascars and Princes by Rozina Visram

2. Across the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers by Caroline Adam’s

3. Chains to Lose Memoirs of Dada Amir Haidar Khan

4. Sons of the Empire Compiled by Yousuf Choudhury

5. Globalising Labour: Indian Seafarers and World Shipping by G. Balachandran

Two standout organisations emerged from this research. Swadihata Trust created the first walking trail in my area, and The Travelling Archive produce high quality field recordings from Bangladesh.

Field Recordings from Bengal

For this event, we also 3D-scanned a model ship created by Artist Researcher Remiiya Badru. These scans later featured in the promotional poster.

Up Next

• The team are working towards digitising the current trail, offering a new way to engage with the research

• More events, a large programme involving Remiiya’s walking trail

• Continued support for the battle to memorialise south asian seafarers throughout the docklands, London

• Digitising the current trail to offer a new, interactive way to engage with the research

• A full programme built combining Remiiya’s and Asif’s walking trail

• Continued advocacy to memorialise South Asian seafarers across London’s Docklands

September 2021

Ronan McKenzie hosted a panel discussion about female empowerment and what it means to uplift women in photography.

She was joined by 4 photographers whose work steered away from the standard male representation of female empowerment and offers new perspectives on it. They were: Harley Weir who stands at the forefront of fine art and fashion photography whilst maintaining an ability to challenge standard approaches to expression within that medium such as ‘Paintings’ published with Loose Joints or ‘Function’ with Baron; Yushi Li who mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks; Jameela Elfaki -- who celebrates diversity, beauty and identity with a focus on the representation and inclusivity of women of colour and marginalised women; and Elizabeth Okoh who uses boudoir photography as a tool to strengthen self-love and body image.

Who Are We

Tinted is an emerging creative initiative aimed at diversifying the photography industry. This can mean many different things from producing stock content, working with clients for commissioned work, as well as supporting photographers. Because of our ultimate goal, we aim to support photographers of colour and allied groups.

Where it began

Tinted was created as a direct response to the lack of free diverse images on stock photography platforms. To be specific, our founder wanted to find an image of “an anklet on a black foot.” Despite the stock photography industry expecting to reach $4 billion in revenue by 2023, with over 350 million photos worldwide, you still will not find one image of an “anklet on a black foot.” Though this describes a specific instance, our attention is drawn to something more general. Current stock photography platforms fail to address the issue of diversifying their imagery in a way that empowers the communities they aim to visually represent. Instead, we are incentivised to represent our own community at extortionate fees of up to 80%. Whilst no incentive is offered when creating free diverse imagery.

The Wider Problem

For the Creatives

The Issue itself is intersectional. Whilst on one hand, photographers of colour are not directed towards photography as a means of income. Instead, encouraged into STEM education as a “call to action and moralizing rhetorical device for an educational movement with seemingly endless funding and political support.” (Link) The photographers of colour successfully making it through these barriers are now left in a position of isolation, initially existing in a space where surrounding figures mismatch their skin tone, later evolving into outbursts of unconscious bias. The New York Times’ Sarah Lewis highlighted ‘The Racial Bias Built Into Photography’ by reminding her readers that photography is a system of subjective decisions — from lighting, modelling, to set-design — “light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology” (Link). Even Campbell Addy, an artist abundantly motivated in diversifying whatever space he touches, resorted to creating Nii Agency as a direct response to the lack of diverse models. Similarly, shout out to the organisation Models of Diversity.

Moving forward, we believe that this issue will be solved with increased awareness of the different roles available in the photography industry and community support to guide and encourage photography as a role.

For the Clients

So far, we have only looked at the issue from the perspective of the creatives, but there are two faces to this beast. Between 2018 to 2019 around 670,000 start ups were formed in the UK. Of these numbers, around 60% of these businesses failed, with the majority of these successful businesses not generating profit til their third year. What i’m trying to reveal is that the startup journey is expensive and hard-hitting. In other words, it’s a survival instinct to cut costs. Because of this, startups turn to free stock imagery in search of quick-fix content for their digital ads, blogs, website landing images, and more. Above I detailed the struggle of finding “an anklet on a black foot,” I also highlighted the extortionate fees. The scary fact remains, up to this point I have been referring to paid stock photography platforms, where there is a direct incentive to produce diverse imagery, namely, payment. Unfortunately, these platforms are not the go to service for startups, who instead cut costs at every corner.

More favourable choices are Pexels, Unsplash or Pixabay, to name a few. On these platforms, diversity of imagery plummets dramatically, with the resulting response being free stock platforms focusing on diverse imagery. You’ve got Nappy Co, Dragon Images, Mocha Stock, and more. These are great initiatives and the team at Tinted wholly support them. The issue however persists if there is no direct incentive to producing diverse stock imagery. Another way to put it is that stock imagery should be free, but it should not be so in a way that disfavours the creative. A lot of these platforms make their income from ad placements and merchandise, which in no way benefits the creative. It’s also important to note that startups want to market to a diverse audience, but their ability to do so depends on the content readily available on these stock platforms.

Because of this, a key differentiator between Tinted and the rest is that we aim to produce free diverse stock imagery in a way that also favours creatives. How is this possible? Simply put, by creating a marketing ecosystem in which businesses with the goal of reaching a diverse audience are supported by creatives with the production of marketing assets. Namely, photos and eventually videos. The beauty of this model is that every produced asset is done so by members of the community and paid for by the business in need. It’s true to think that a business can create its own agreements with creatives, but what Tinted offer is a nurtured community. We are the guarantee and validator of quality, thereby functioning as an intermediary production company focused on supporting different-sized businesses.

Why Now

During this decade, the increased global awareness of Black, Asian, and African consciousness and the issues we all face as an intercultural community has reached new heights. Not only must we be listened to as our protests demand, but following the capitalist mindset, people like Michael Jordan, Kanye West, and Riz Ahmed have shown the world that there is money to be made when you align your product with the wider culture of Black, Asian, and African consciousness.

Tinted aims to change these issues both for the creative and for the corporates. We are here for the misfits.

We hosted an active participatory workshop which aimed to develop the skills of photography and cinema techniques in storytelling. We focused on lighting for portraits and food. This workshop also featured talks from keynote speakers: Eddie Otchere and Will Spooner.

During this workshop, participants were introduced to the story of Broadway Market - a market stall in Hackney that had undergone development by the local council. They explored techniques in lighting people during interview settings by interviewing Lousie Brewood - the founder of the market.

Guided by Tosin, they were able to record an interview which goes deeper into the story.

After learning about the market, participants explored techniques in food photography. They were encouraged to walk through Broadway Market, learning how to use creativity as a tool for researching the social impact in the community.

As a budding British-Nigerian caught at the edge of the city centre booming with progress, entrepreneurial spirit, and a zest for life, it can be hard to know where you’re going or where you’ve been. A major reason for starting Tinted is to connect the BAME community through photography and film. But it’s also for more selfish reasons. To learn a skill that will help me tell others where I’m going and where I’ve been. Storytelling is a tool to do just this. And storytelling in film, even better.

Stanley Kubrick says something along the lines of ‘Film is just a collection of amazing photos accompanied by a banging soundtrack’. I use this train of thought to justify my interest in photography. it’s a means to an end and one that requires time and precision. So master photography to master film. That’s the aim. After coming to this realisation, I turned to Youtube, Medium, friends and family, and everything single corner I could turn to for a morsel of knowledge. What I noticed was a lack of resources properly allocated to supporting the growth of amateur photographers. Photography can be a lonely skill. The time spent waiting for the right composition. The relationship you build with your editing setup. But it can also be cooperative. it’s role is to document human history. That act in of itself is something done today to help tomorrow. It’s people cooperating now to help later. For something so cooperative there's very little time and effort spent helping the growth and development of this skill.

So that’s where it all started. A desire to develop a skill. A discovery that envelops the will — namely, the evergreen of photography styles discouraging participation for fear of confusion or embarrassment. A lot of people zone into one style and master that style. Heck, in some cases your closed network of photographers all appeal to the same style. This approach is limiting. It sets a standard as the go-to then replicates. I want Tinted to represent the underrepresented and to appreciate all styles. This blog therefore will help any reader journey into different photography styles. I will document what I learn about each style and share my findings here. Through the Tinted lens, we’ll learn and grow together.