They Did Not Sell Their Cameras

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.2 (2003) ISSN 1546-2250 They Did Not Sell Their Cameras Frank Bierens Christiaan Kuypers Homeless World Foundation Citation: Bierens, Frank and Christiaan Kuypers. “They Did Not Sell Their Cameras.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(2), 2003. We appreciate the opportunity to react to the review of Home/Life and will link our response to selected passages of it. The cities represented in this project are from around the world, but there is no explanation of their selection. A municipal judge derailed the project in Rio de Janeiro and government officials thwarted the project in Beijing, insisting that there are no homeless children in China. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary in each of these cities, it would have been interesting to learn more about this lack of cooperation. The Home/Life project was initiated by a journalist, a graphic designer and a publisher, all Dutch, but (at the time) living in Jakarta, New York and Amsterdam, respectively. For funding as well as realizing this project, we involved our friends and colleagues around the world. As soon as the idea was born we invited our friends and family for a dinner in the prestigious Hotel Blakes on the canals in Amsterdam, owned by the brother of one of the initiators. The guests had to pay 1000 guilders (about 500 dollars); 100 guilders for food and drinks, 900 for the project. Seventy people accepted the invitation and the newly established foundation started out that night with a “working capital” of 172 about 60,000 guilders. This amount enabled us to set up the workshops in 11 countries and pay for the film and the costs for developing it. The choice of the cities started out randomly. Basically, we approached our friends around the world and asked them whether they wanted to participate in this project. They were journalists, photographers, diplomats and people working for various NGOs. We asked them to approach local NGOs working with street children and discuss with them the possibility of setting up these workshops. Some succeeded; some did not. At the same time, we tried to realize a good mixture of countries and continents which we did not establish completely to our own satisfaction. For instance in South America, we were merely able to involve people in Surinam and did not succeed in Brazil and Colombia. Likewise, the book offers no information on the selection of the children who took part in the photo workshops and were given cameras. More information on how the workshop coordinators chose the participating children would have provided useful background for viewing the photographs. The way we organized these workshops resulted from the fact that the children involved in the workshops differed from one country to another, depending on the local NGO involved. The only denominators were the age of the children and the fact that they were not living “at home.” In Johannesburg and Moscow the children were really homeless and lived in the streets and in the railway station, but in New York the children lived in an institution where they were recently united with their mothers who had just come out of jail. In Jakarta they were living in an orphanage and in Budapest they were gypsies. In Rotterdam they had been taken away from their families by court order and in Paris they had recently immigrated from Africa. The editors selected the 150 photographs included in the book according to artistic merit, the only criterion being ‘image quality' with consideration of ‘composition, subject, and 173 emotional charge' (pp. 6-7). It is not clear, however, what this means. Further, while the photos were not cropped or otherwise edited, adults not living on the street selected them, introducing a filter in the portrayal of the homes and lives of street children and raising the question of whether their own selection might have been different. Yes, if the children had made the choice of photos themselves, the final collection of photos would have been completely different. For the opening of the exhibit in Jakarta we were able to invite two participants each from Paramaribo, Cairo, Nairobi, New Delhi and Rotterdam...