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. Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye.

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 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 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. They were astounded by some of the selected pictures and asked, “Why did you choose this picture? It is not sharp!” From the workshops organized in Rotterdam we learned that they love the obvious: the red sunset and the cute dog.

We agree that one could have made completely different books/exhibitions from the 15,000 pictures the kids have taken, but for now we have treated them as if they were professional artists and selected pictures that we would have selected for a feature story in a magazine. Therefore we have included pictures like those of central heating pipes and the inside of a toilet made by Mitchel in Rotterdam. He would have never made that choice. Actually, he would have never have made a choice at all: nobody was able to communicate with him; in all four workshops we organized he did not say one word. But he made wonderful pictures.

An early section of the book includes photo galleries organized around themes such as trees, cars, garbage, animals, icons, and neighborhoods. No reason is given for this thematic selection. It is not clear whether a workshop assignment instructed the children to focus on them, whether they emerged as dominant themes from the total pool of photos, or whether the editors chose them and then selected matching photos. Further detail on the contents of the workshops would give better insight into what the children learned and what guidance they received, if any, for taking photographs.

Going through the 15,000 pictures, it became clear that the children all over the world photographed the same objects: trees, cars, garbage, animals, icons, and neighborhoods. Whether they live in Nairobi, in Jakarta or in New York City, kids like to photograph television sets and above all, themselves. In the workshops they were never given assignments to make self-portraits or signs. These themes seem to be the visual vocabulary of street children around the world.

Finally, there is no evaluative information on the workshops. What was the drop out rate? What did the children themselves think of the experience? Is there a follow-up opportunity for those who showed an interest in further improving their photographing skills and honing their artistic talents?

In some of the cities our correspondents organized new workshops or other programs. We hoped to be able to finance new initiatives, but unfortunately so far we have not been able to do so.

The drop out rate was surprisingly low. It differed from one city to another but the average drop out rate was probably about 10 percent. When we started out we talked a lot about the risks of giving them a “real” camera. Many people warned us that the kids would sell the camera and would never return to the workshops. They obviously did not. Maybe the cameras were too cheap...

Although trained as a lawyer, Frank Bierens (46) has been involved in publishing his entire professional life. He has launched several magazines in The Netherlands, mostly magazines targeted at young people. He has written a book on street language and was involved in several TV/web-projects with kids. His latest venture is the online youth magazine Spunk ( www.spunk.nl ), under which brand name he is now beginning to publish books and will soon start a nationally televised show. Together with his high school-friend Geert van Asbeck and his student-friend Christiaan Kuypers he initiated the Homeless World Foundation.

After studying graphic design and photography at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Christiaan Kuypers (40) moved to the United States to work as an art director of various magazines such as Spy, Time, Interview, and Spin. Since 1999 he has headed up Kstudio, a design firm in New York City with clients in the fields of contemporary art, museums, design, and publishing. Most recently he has been working as art director and designer for the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, AR, which will open to the public in November 2004.