“During that month,” he told me, “I would sit with families in their homes in Kibera for an hour or two, talking. And by the end of our conversation, they would have pulled out these amazing, old photographs from shoeboxes that they had never shown anybody outside of their own family. This documentation of the Nubian community was something that nobody had ever seen before. So the pieces of this project were already all there

Does learning about photography make your life better? If you’re 18, and have already been homeless, and in foster care, and been through major family disintegration—does using a camera or participating in a photography program make some kind of tangible difference for you?

That’s the central question for a community based photographer, and the organization that works with him or her. And it’s a hard one to answer.

The Freedom to Create Prize celebrates the power of art to fight oppression, break down stereotypes and build trust in societies where the social fabric has been ripped apart by conflict, violence and misunderstanding. History shows that prosperous societies are founded upon creativity. Societies that encourage artistic expression build strong foundations for economic, political and cultural development. They will lead tomorrow’s world.

This morning, I caught up with James Chance, who has just won the Emerging Vision prize sponsored by Pictures of the Year International. He receives a $10,000 grant plus exhibition at the Annenberg Space for photography in Los Angeles, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. You can [...]

At Place de Marron Camp there is a strong sense of both supportive camaraderie and angry desperation. Preparation for the Monday protest again President Preval was ongoing, with angry demands for work, food, solutions. The leadership and response vacuum from the central government continues, and despair and anger are mounting.

I am in Haiti for a week as a student PhotoPhilanthropist to do a shoot with MercyCorps, shooting images of their relief projects as well as general pictures around Haiti in order to help them tell their story.

“It’s grabbing everybody,” says Marcus Vega, a participant in the kNOw’s photography class in Fresno with artist Joseph Smooke. “Like when I come here, I get to escape from my daily life. It just cancels out everything. It’s like a whole new environment.”

Activist Award Director Kathleen Hennessy travels to Guatemala as a volunteer photographer and meets Claudia Jona, an 11-year-old Mayan girl. “Being journalists, we are trained not to get too close, to be objective. How can you be objective when it comes to a suffering child? But, here, I am not working as a journalist. I am a volunteer. I have permission to care. I have permission to give.”

Fazal Sheikh is an artist and activist based in Zurich, Switzerland. His work has been widely exhibited, in institutions ranging from the Tate Modern to the Princeton University Art Museum to small huts in rural India. He has collaborated with numerous foundations and non-governmental-organizations, and he has won, among many other awards, a MacArthur Prize.

I asked him to do an interview with the PhotoPhilanthropy blog because he approaches collaboration, strategic partnerships and accessibility in a way that I find very inspiring.

In the UK there’s an old saying,”an Apple a day keeps the Doctor away”, this has been adopted here in Cambodia for the children of the PIO school, but using eggs and a daily multivitamin suppliment tablet.