Long awaited, but the time has come. On June 16th, I entered a house in La Capri with my first ever team, and construction began on what is to be a photography studio. The idea was born about three months ago from nothing more than a daydream. As I flipped through pictures from a photography blog, I thought to myself, “How cool would it be to take pictures for a living?” While feeling quite awkward in front of the camera, I’ve always loved being behind one. I’ve never been considered a great photographer, yet I know that God likes to use some of the least qualified to do His great works. The daydreaming questions turned into actual questions as I asked my boss what he thinks of me opening a photography studio to teach photography and film developing classes. To my surprise, he jumped at the idea, with an encouraging, “Do it!” A week later we found ourselves in the office of a pastor with ideas spilling out of our pores. The meeting ended with him offering a house for us to use in La Capri (a community that we’ve had our eyes on for expansion), rent free!
Months of planning and research has led to the following overview of what we hope the photo studio will provide, accomplish, and change in the community:
Target Students: ages 12-20 who have an artistic disposition that has yet to be discovered or yet to be encouraged. We want students who are at risk due to living in drug or violent communities. We want students who have something to say, something to scream, and stories to tell, even if they don’t know it yet.
Schedule: “The Studio” will be open Tuesday through Friday with two class sessions each day. Tuesday’s class will focus on new techniques, skills and assignments. It will be spent in the community, with people of the community, talking, listening, and capturing. Assignments will be purposefully open themes to encourage creativity. Wednesday will be spent in the darkroom, developing film from the day before. Thursday (also in the darkroom) will be a day of selecting negatives to print and enlarge. Friday will be when everything comes together, as we put pictures from the week into our photo journals and write what we saw, what we heard, what we felt, through poetry, lyrics, and stories.
Costa Rica is no different than any other part of the world, in the sense that there are pockets of poverty and pockets of wealth. The two rarely meet, and only know the other through what they see on TV. One has a voice, the other doesn’t. One has options, the other doesn’t. One is smart, the other isn’t... It’s easy to see the error in this logic, but it’s harder to believe that it isn’t true. My hope is to provide these students with voices so that they may show the joy, pain, fear, hope, love, hate, and stories of their lives and their community through the pictures that they take. The majority of the people in the San José area haven’t heard of La Capri. The majority of the people that have heard of it won’t go there. If the worlds of the “haves” and the “have nots” can come a little closer because of the photos that are yet to be taken, then – mission accomplished.
I still don’t know the roads we’ll take, but it seems like we’re heading in the right direction...
