The group met twice a week for a skills workshop, a review of student work and to discuss photographic ideas and themes.
Central to the workshops were ideas of thinking photographically about their families, friends, homes, work, neighbourhood, and the importance of being able to represent yourself through photography.
Exploring their personal environments photographically the students were able to communicate, in a new and expressive way, detailing their lives.
Using film donated by commercial photographers in the UK, they experimented with different types of film and development techniques.
Enthused by this freedom and experimentation, the students were empowered to produce images of their lives, to represent life as they see it, and to begin to develop a photographic voice.
‘The increasing number of photography workshops that open every day will not change the world, but they will contribute to visually educating the collective groups that participate in them. It may seem a worthless contribution, but access to culture, in any of it’s forms is the first of all actions which are necessary to reaffirm individual and collective dignity…
Our own inertia to rely on large scale all encompassing projects, both in economic or political fields, may lead us to think this way, but history is showing us that social justce is a mosaic made up principally of numerous small pieces, that inadvertently overthrow the false power of grandiloquence.’
Alejandro Castellote, from ‘ph15’, ‘fotografias por chicos de ciudad oculta’