ARE WE REALLY MAKING A DIFFERENCE? by Walter Bodle, Founder, Youth In Focus
September 1, 2008
Are youth photography programs really doing what their missions say they are doing? Are we really changing lives? Who is being empowered? What impact are they making - if any? Read more
Notes from the Classroom: Visual Storytelling in a Composition Course
July 2, 2008
It all started with an unlikely idea: integrating participant-produced documentaries into the upper-division general education writing course we teach at USC. Given that students are already so steeped in visual culture, one could legitimately question why we would waste classroom time teaching film basics rather than the more critical skills of written argument and analysis. Read more
Teens Explore Racism In London: Video Art Postcards
May 28, 2008
In the summer of 2007, two groups of teenagers aged 14 to 19 from the London Borough of Newham participated in a unique experience: assisted by video artists and historians, the teenagers uncovered sites related to historical racism and anti-racism in the West India Docks area of London and expressed their interpretation of this history and heritage creatively, using digital media and their imaginations. Read more
IPE In The Classroom: Visual Communication and Social Change
May 15, 2008
We have just completed a unique class at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication titled Visual Communication and Social Change. One of my course requirements for the nine student in my class was to engage a practical application of some of the course content from the burgeoning field of Participatory Photography, also known as subject produced photography, photographic empowerment and pluralist photography. Read more
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Changing the World One Shot at a Time
May 13, 2008
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Ann Jones spent several years as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan focusing on the lives of women and wrote a moving book, Kabul in Winter, about her experience. More recently, she took Tomdispatch readers to West Africa. There, she laid out the chilling nightmare of women’s lives in strife-torn lands in which the war against women doesn’t end just because grim wars between men finally do. Read more
