Presenting Video Vera

Vera Media was a video production and training partnership founded in Leeds by Catherine Mitchell and Al Garthwaite in 1985. They specialised in participatory documentaries as a way to involve, develop and empower a wide variety of socially-excluded groups to tell their own stories through video. Participants were taught technical and creative skills, with an emphasis on giving women control of technology they might traditionally have been excluded from using. For most participants this was an empowering experience which led to increased self-confidence, but it also made a contribution to the wider community beyond the trainees. The completed works always had public showings, for both invited guests and the general public. Communities had an opportunity to see themselves, their geography or their work championed as never before - and the legacy continues in this collection.