The first of our up-country Photos Tell Stories photography workshops is at Farafenni Senior Secondary High School. Big thanks to Musa Jallow for helping us set up today.
After 3 1/2 hours of waiting in a mile long line, in 90+ degree heat, that wasn’t moving anywhere fast, enough was enough – plus, we did want to get to Farafenni today! – we decided to take the ‘fast track’, as we had watched many other vehicles doing, to the front of the line. You can deduce for yourselves what that means, but lets just say that it involved paying out more Dalassi than we intended to! And, then it was wacky races, with all of those other ‘fast trackers‘, to get to the ferry, and getting our rear tail light taken out by a gilly gilly (local minibus) in the process!
We’ve been extremely busy over the last couple of weeks, since beginning the first ‘Photos Tell Stories: teaching photography – a visual language‘ – here in The Gambia, West Africa – the first one being a 4-day workshop, where our students produced some inspired work. And, we are just about to run out again to meet with those students, to present them with their ‘Certificates of Attendance’. However, we just wanted to share these images of a couple of yesterdays photography students, proudly showing off their certificates, from a 1-day workshop we held in the village of Kembujeh.
Kembujeh student: Sally Asamoah
We have great images to share with you from the students, which we will upload soon. However, please bear with us as tomorrow we head up-country, to Farafenni and Soma, to hold more 1-day ‘Photos Tell Stories’ workshops.
Thanks for stopping by – please come back to see how well our Gambian photography students have been doing.
Please check out our ‘Behind-the-Scenes‘ FB photo album – for regularly updated snap shots of Jason Florio working with the Gambian photography students for ‘Photos Tell Stories: teaching photography – a visual language‘
We’ll be posting more of the students images from the initial 4-day workshop very soon. Later this week, we start to take the workshops on the road – for 1-day ‘Village Photography Workshops‘ – to more rural and up-country areas of The Gambia. We’re looking forward to this as it’s these areas that both of us spend most of time in, whenever we travel to the country.
Our first stop will be the small village of Kembujeh – which is in the area where Jason photographed much of his ‘Makasutu-mecca in the forest‘ series of portraits; taken over a period of 12 years. We’ll no doubt be stopping for tea at fisherman, Abdou Ndong’s compound, in the village – a favorite ‘Makasutu’ subject and great friend of Jason’s over the years.
Abdou was also one the fishermen who came on the ‘River Gambia Expedition – 1044km source-sea African odyssey’ (2013-14), along with Ebou Jarju, who is kindly helping us to arrange the photography students for the Kembujeh workshop.
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