The Story
Where it all began for Digital Schools
The Digital Schools story began in Hull in 1997 — with photography, youth media and a belief that schools deserved better digital communication.
Hull, 1997. Before YouTube, social media, or broadband Britain — a photographer, a darkroom, a dial-up connection, and a radical idea that started everything.
Cafe Society was founded in Hull as an open forum for the promotion, debate, and exhibition of photography and electronic image — through the internet and through alternative gallery venues across the UK and Europe. It was one of the earliest networked digital storytelling platforms in the UK arts sector, and it was built in a terraced house in East Yorkshire.
The founding principle was simple — and it has never changed:
Give a community the tools to tell their own story. Then get out of the way.
The idea behind Cafe Society
Founded and led by photographer and digital media artist Jonathan Robson, Cafe Society operated at the intersection of photography, digital art, community engagement, and emerging internet technology. At a time when most organisations were still figuring out what a website was, Cafe Society was using the web as a live, collaborative creative space.
The work wasn’t about technology for its own sake. It was about access. It was about giving people — communities, schools, young people in isolated or underserved places — the means to communicate their experience in ways that felt authentic and powerful.
Every project that followed — from a coast-to-coast American road trip in 1998 to curriculum film workshops in Sierra Leone in 2007 — was an extension of that founding instinct.
Hull in the late 1990s
Hull in 1997 was a city finding its feet. The creative scene was fertile but scrappy — a network of artists, photographers, musicians, and makers working in studios, community spaces, and converted warehouses across the city.
Cafe Society plugged directly into that network. The open forum model — anyone could bring work, anyone could discuss it, anyone could get involved — meant the project quickly became something bigger than one person’s practice. It became a community.
The internet gave that community reach it had never had before. Work made in Hull could be seen in Amsterdam. Images shot on the road in America could be reinterpreted in real time by artists back in Yorkshire. The geography of the creative community suddenly became irrelevant.
The technology that made it possible
It is worth pausing to appreciate what Cafe Society was doing technically in 1997. Digital cameras were expensive, unwieldy, and produced images that look laughably low-resolution today. Broadband didn’t exist for most people. Uploading a single photograph could take minutes. A live website with collaborative image exchange was an ambitious undertaking by any standard.
But the constraints shaped the work in interesting ways. The slowness of the technology created space for conversation. The limitations of early digital image quality pushed the work towards abstraction, manipulation, and reinterpretation. The technical difficulty of making the work visible meant that when it was visible, it mattered.
The legacy
Cafe Society ran from 1997 to 2008 — eleven years, six countries, dozens of projects, hundreds of young people given a platform and a voice.
When Digital Schools was founded in 2008, it wasn’t a pivot or a reinvention. It was a continuation. The same photographer. The same instinct. The same belief that every community has a story worth telling — and deserves the tools to tell it brilliantly.
The schools of East Yorkshire weren’t so different from the communities of the Navajo Reservation, or the young people of post-conflict Freetown, or the island schools of the Seychelles. They all had stories. They all deserved to be heard.
This chapter in Digital Schools history shaped the creative approach that still defines our work today.
Every project that followed — from a coast-to-coast American road trip in 1998 to curriculum film workshops in Sierra Leone in 2007 — was an extension of that founding instinct.
