18 young photographers from 4 countries
Photojournalism students from China, Bangladesh, Nepal and Norway attended a start-up workshop in Nepal last week with world-famous Christopher Morris and Philip Blenkinsop from VII Academy as tutors.
California-born Morris has a long career as a photographer covering conflicts and the White House for Time Magazine, while the Australian-British Blenkinsop has covered Asia from Thailand for twenty five years.
Their aim was to teach the young photographers how to approach people in a foreign land, most of them without knowledge of the local language and culture.
The method was photographing people in the streets, followed by extensive critique sessions by the tutors. The last day, the students produced a small booklet with their 10 best photos to learn how to create a visual narrative. Their images was shown at a public screening the last night.
The start-up workshop was a warming up for four weeks individual field work all over Nepal. This will be followed by an editing workshop, after which the students will produce a book, an exhibition and a webpage – to be launched at the photo festival DOK 20 in Fredrikstad in Norway.
Some of the photos from the workshop are already published on Instagram tippingpoint2020, and more will appear on a Facebook page.
The project is a collaboration between Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Bangladesh and OsloMet, which has been going on for almost twenty years. The first cooperation project with photo.circle was in 2010, while VII Academy is a new partner. The project has mainly been funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Chris Morris teaching in the streets (Photo: Robik Upadhyay)
Philip Blenkinsop analysing images (Photo: Sagar Chhetri)
Students from Nepal, China, Bangladesh and Norway (Photo: Sagar Chhetri)
Around 100 persons came for the screening (Photo: Sagar Chhetri)
