Capturing the context: your year in 12 photos

Next date: Saturday, 19 December 2026 | 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM

Scrapbook page with photograph of two people on the left hand side with handwritten text describing the photograph beside it

You have thousands of photos on your phone, and no one will know who is in them or why they mattered. Stories are an essential part of a family’s heritage and legacy. Preserving them is not only about recording events, but mainly about safeguarding the rich tapestry of a family’s history, culture, values and experiences.

Drawing on over a decade of professional experience at the British Library and State Library of Victoria, as well as her personal business Your Photo Legacy, Skybridge exhibiting artist Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor will share her digital photo organising workflow and address key topics including back-up standards, file formats, metadata, and file naming.

In this relaxed, hands-on workshop, you’ll choose favourite photos from your year and start writing the stories behind them by hand. You’ll leave with two photo stories begun, a simple method you can repeat, and clarity on your next steps for transforming them into an easy photobook.

Bring a phone, laptop or tablet with access to your photos from this year so you can choose your favourites (or bring printed photos if you prefer). The writing is done by hand, and pens and paper are provided. No preparation needed, just a willingness to look back and reflect. A charger could be handy too.

Find out more about the artist's exhibition, Every Image Holds Another Image.

Image credit: Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor, Story Capture Workshop, 2025.

Who will be teaching?

Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor is an Australian visual artist whose practice examines the relationship between photography, memory and the archive. Working across photography, moving image, text and installation, she draws upon an extensive personal archive to explore how images accumulate and acquire new meanings over time.

Through processes of collecting, ordering and recontextualisation, Sancho Taylor considers the archive as a space of continual reinterpretation, where memory, loss, absence and the complexities of time intersect.

Her practice is informed by her professional experience working with photographic collections at the State Library of Victoria and the British Library.

Sancho Taylor holds a Master of Fine Art from RMIT University, Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including exhibitions at Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2026); Five Walls, Melbourne (2024); Kuiper Projects, Brisbane (2020); Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Centre for Classics and Archaeology, University of Melbourne (2017); Arxiu Comarcal de l'Urgell, Tàrrega, Spain (2017); BLINDSIDE, Melbourne (2016).

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