Seeing slum life through photos and film

It is a dream come true for several teenage girls and boys from Kenyan slums, who are now making international headlines with great photo exhibitions.
Girl Guides get a feel of what a digital camera can do. Read more

Paris: Retrospective of Kenya photography: ‘It gives them a voice’

The close-up shows a boy of no more than 14 bludgeoned to death, a bloodstained rock next to his head. “This thief was beaten because he stole a TV and radio,” the caption says. “They say a thief’s life-span is about 40 days. He would not have been killed if life in the slum was not so hard.” Read more

Youth photography project based in the Mathare Valley slum

The Mwelu Foundation is a youth photography project based in the Mathare Valley slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Currently we are working with 45 children who themselves are determined to change their lives for the better. Read more

Time Magazine: Shootback: The Keenest Eyes of Africa

By VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS. If you were in Nairobi’s desperately poor neighborhood of Mathare during the mid-1990s, you might have seen a slender American woman wandering around the shanties, where nearly a million people live with minimal water supply amid puddles of raw sewage. The visitor was Lana Wong, a Harvard-educated fine-art photographer, who had come to Mathare with one aim: to teach teenagers how to shoot photographs. “I picked 31 kids, and handed them plastic $30 cameras and a roll of film each,” says Wong. “I wanted them to tell their own stories, rather than have me intervene. Most of them had never seen a camera.” Read more