Help the Blikkiesdorp Photography Contest: A great initiative teaching children to appreciate photography in Blikkiesdorp.
No Man’s Art Gallery, an art gallery based in Amsterdam, is currently running a great initiative in Cape Town. The Blikkiesdorp Photography Contest involves handing disposable cameras to children in the township in order to stimulate an interest in photography.
On Saturday 15 February, the gallery’s Cape Town team gave 40 disposable cameras to children aged 8-16 in Blikkiesdorp and has since been spending time teaching them the ins and outs of taking great photos and how to appreciate the self-expression that the medium offers. They also showed the kids some photos taken by children in a previous project by the gallery, the Slum Photography Contest held in Mumbai, India in 2011 – See the photos in the featured image above, or buy prints online.
From the gallery’s website:
“On Saturday February 15th our Cape Town team is headed to Blikkiesdorp, one of many townships surrounding the Mother City. The reason of our visit is that we are finally repeating our Photography Contest there.
We first organized the Slum Photography Contest in the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai, India. There we gave 45 kids an analogue camera and a workshop on how to use it before sending them of to document their lives and their youth. All kids got the prints of their film rolls and kept the cameras. Since 2011, we have been selling their pictures to raise money to buy new film rolls for the kids and to repeat the project elsewhere. It allows the kids to experiment with photography and contribute to the happiness of another kid living in similar circumstances somewhere else in the world.
This Saturday we’ll be giving disposable cameras to 40 children ages 8 – 16 from Blikkiesdorp. They will learn how to take a good photo, see an exhibition of the pictures of the previous participants and will start experimenting with photography as a way of expressing themselves and their situation.”
After the contest, the kids’ photos will be exhibited and sold online in order to fund the next outreach project. However, No Man’s Art Gallery has not been able to raise enough capital to fully fund this outreach project yet, despite putting all of their effort and available money into it so far.
How To Help
The Orms Print Room is helping the the project out by printing the images at a discounted rate. If you’d also like to help, please visit the gallery’s website for more information – anything from small monetary donations to old unused film cameras can help!
