Voices aims at inner-city children and works to give them a way to
express themselves and to view their daily environment in an alternative way.
Columbia Parks and Recreation hosts the workshop, and
various sponsors support it with film
material, frames and room. Voices is organized by photography students.
In 1996, Eric Adams was in
charge and many photojournalism and photography students joined him by mentoring
a child or helping out with film processing.
The
School of Journalism at the
University of Missouri-Columbia provided
cameras and the photo lab to support Voices.
The 1996 workshop started on April 6 with a general presentation
about photography and the children's introduction the the cameras. During ths
session, the mentoring students assisted and the children picked their mentors
for the remaining sessions.
After being introduced to the basics of
photography, the workshop went to Columbia's Douglass Park to take pictures of
the "Great Easter Egg Hunt" organized by Columbia Parks and
Recreation.
Session number two on April 13 presented advanced photography
background such as focus, aperture and exposure time. Then, all children along
with their mentors went to their neighborhoods in groups of two to portrait the
places they live in.
This imposed the first real challenge onto the new
photographers as they were required to "think before they shoot", the
main theme of the whole workshop. In teaching this
Voices motivated the children to reflect their environment in an
alternative, more thoughtful way.
April 21 brought up a new, exciting experience. Following an
introduction about photo editing, where the children had to select their two
favourite photos from their contact sheets, the group went to the
School of Journalism's photo
lab to print the pictures.
Working in the darkroom, using projectors and
seeing the photos appear on formerly white paper motivated the childern beyond
what the mentors experienced on the former workshop weekends.
As this day
Voices happend on Earth Day 1996, some of the children asked for film
and a camera and went to Peace Park, which is located next to the photo lab, to
take more pictures.
A close relationship between the mentors and their
students proved very helpful in motivating and teaching. Some of the children
even called their mentors and asked if they could join them in their school
photo assignments and take more pictures.
The last workshop session on April 28 introduced a whole new world
of photography. Along with their mentors, the children were taken to a computer
classroom at the
School of Journalism. There
they had the opportunity to see 'Electronic Photograpy' in multimeda
applications and to explore the Internet by themselves after they wrote their
photo captions for the
Children's Photo Album.
The Voices
on-line project with their photography was presented as far as it was set up at
the workshop's time.
Select from the following photo collections:
