Gambian photography workshops students, Kartong village, The Gambia – ‘Photos Tell Stories’ with Jason Florio

We just returned from the village of Kartong, after teaching another successful ‘Photos Tell Stories‘ photography workshop with students chosen from the Press Club of St Martins Basic Cycle School. Not one of the students had used a digital camera before – although a couple of the students used their phone cameras sometimes.  After a morning of theory, with tutor and photographer, Jason Florio,  in the classroom, we sent them off to photograph the village in which they lived. Yet again, we were captivated by the work that they produced throughout the day. The average age of the students was fifteen years old.

These are just a few samples of the Press Club students work – which, at the end of their days shoot, they edited with the help of workshop tutor and photographer, Jason Florio.  Then, as we have been doing after all of the Gambian workshops, projected  their images onto the cinema-sized inflatable screen (thanks to Josh and the guys at the US Embassy, Banjul – our main partners for the workshops in The Gambia),  later that evening – to audience of around 150 enraptured villagers!

If you would like to find out more about ‘Photos Tell Stories: teaching photography – a visual language‘ with award-winning photographer, Jason Florio, and producer, Helen Jones-Florio, please check out this link.

We also had an overseas guest for our Kartong workshop, our nephew, Tyrone Florio; who had recently flown in from the UK. Tyrone is studying photography and decided he wanted to come out and help us with the workshops. However, there is no room for nepotism in the ‘Photos Tell Stories‘ camp as we set Tyrone the same assignment as the rest of our students. We think he did very well too.

Thanks to FujiFilm, USA, for the digital cameras which our ‘Photos Tell Stories’ Gambian students used to produce some very creative, insightful,  and encouraging work. Encouraging, because it has spurred us on to want to do more workshops in West Africa.

We’ll be adding more work from our other workshops over the coming week – along with ‘Behind-the-Scenes‘ images. In the meantime, please check out what we have up here so far on our ‘Photos Tell Students Students Work‘ page.

Thank you for stopping by.

The Florios

Helen Jones-Florio – Photos Tell Stories producer

Jason Florio – Photos Tell Stories photographer and tutor