Tea and sympathy

When photographer Angela Christofilou accompanied her nonagenarian nan to a church hall bingo session in Heywood, Greater Manchester, in November 2019, she didn't even intend to take any pictures. But, charmed by what she witnessed, she took out her camera and - with the permission of those present - captured a world that was unfamiliar to someone born in Athens whose childhood visits to the North West felt strangely exotic.

As she told those at the Workers Gallery's new monthly book club this week, things just snowballed from there: the images she posted online struck a chord with others, one of them was shortlisted for and subsequently won the British Journal Of Photography's annual "Portrait of Britain" competition in 2022 (subsequently displayed on screens, bus stops and billboards) and ultimately Sherif Dhaimish of Pendle Press proposed a book. 

Church Bingo is slight, and the images it contains are deceptively simple - but there's a lot in them and behind them. The book proved to be a perfect springboard for conversations about everything from community and the connection between images and memory, to insider/outsider access for photographers, the all-male technophilic cliques of camera clubs and the factors that determine which format is best suited to exhibiting/sharing certain types of picture.

Christofilou is primarily a protest photographer so, on the surface at least, this series seems very different. And yet such bingo sessions - self-organised and self-sustained, bringing people together and providing entertainment - are a form of quiet resistance in a neoliberal, atomised society. The images challenge the popular media narrative of the elderly as isolated, dependent and lacking joy.

They also underline the value in documenting the supposedly mundane. Photographers are often feted for recording and thereby preserving a dying way of life, and that is just as true in this case. Five months after the pictures were taken, the COVID-19 lockdown hit. This bingo session never restarted, and the church hall has now closed, likely to be bulldozed for flats. Even more poignantly, Christofilou's nan is now the only featured participant still alive, with several of her fellow attendees victims of the pandemic. Church Bingo is a touching memorial to them, and to community spirit.