"Life of a child through a lens"

Printed in: Grocott's Mail, Grahamstown, South Africa
Reporter: Kanina Foss
Date of publication: June 8, 2007

"Snap. Two babies in blankets, bundled on a couch. Snap. A friend's smiling face, pressed shadowy against a wire fence. Snap. Kids sitting on crates outside a shack, huddled around something on the ground. Snap. A hand holding the match lighting the drugs another's nose is inhaling. Snap. A yellow bus turning a street corner. Snap. The inside of a taxi. Snap. A smudged finger.

Each image is a chapter in one of the life stories told by Amasango Career School pupils who were recently given disposable cameras donated by the American SNAP Foundation.

Their task: take these cameras, tell your story. The end result: immediate visual access to a world some are afraid to visit in person. "It allows people to get as close as they want without actually having to venture into the area," explains Amasango volunteer Jason Torreano, who is from the United States and organized the project.

According to the SNAP website, the foundation gives pupils the chance to explore their world through the lens of a camera, and then to to tell their stories to others. "It's meant as a creative outlet for these kids so they can show people in Grahamstown and people back home [ in the USA ] what their lives are about," says Torreano. "It's a story a lot of people haven't seen."

The children from Amasango have all had a rough start to life. Many of them are at the school because their parents are not providing for them, and they've ended up on the street. "People immediately dismiss them as trouble makers, without knowing where they come from," say Torreano. "Sure, some are addicts and need money for their next fix, but some are trying to support their families by begging."

The point is they're human. "Some see them as opportunistic trouble makers, but they don't see what's behind that, the battles these kids fight on a daily basis," says Torreano.

Amasango tries to get them back on track before mainstreaming them again.

"This is the second time Torreano is volunteering there. He first came last year on a university exchange, then went back home to save money for a second trip. This time he arrived with cameras, 80 of them.

When he told the SNAP Foundation he wanted cameras, they asked him how many. He said 80, not expecting half as many, but before he was due to leave for South Africa, all 80 of them arrived on his doorstep. Some were broken, but Torreano was able to give every child in grades 5,6 and 7 at Amasango a working camera, and a chance at doing a thing some of them had never done before: take a picture.

The easy part, for Torreano, was handing out disposable cameras to a bunch of teens who were really excited about receiving them. "At home, kids wouldn't be excited. Maybe if they were digital," he says.

The difficult part was making sure they didn't fight over them. "You have to make sure you give to one kid, you give to all, so fights don't break out."

He told them they could take pictures of anything that told a story about their lives. "I didn't explain techniques to them because I didn't want them to take perfect shots. That's part of the beauty of it," he says.

Zalisile Dyonashe, 17, took pictures of himself because one day, when he has a son, he wants to be able to show them to him. "I will say to him, that's your father, and he'll be proud to see his daddy can take pictures," he says.

Masixole Sam, 17, also took a picture of himself. "I like it because I can give it to my father. Maybe if I steal something and go to jail my father will think of me. I don't want my father to cry," Masixole says he's happy to be at Amasango because if he's in the location every day he's going to fight and then he might die.

Others took pictures of things they love. Siyabulela Mali, 15, took a picture of a donkey cart and another cow. "I love donkeys," he says. "They do the things you want, give transport. make jobs. I love cows. I love the milk of the cow and the meat." He also took a picture of a scrapyard he says he loves because he finds money there.

The photographs are being exhibited at Rhodes. Torreano says he's glad the youths are going to have a chance to go to the university and feel they have a right to be there.

A while ago he took a few of them onto campus and was approached by a security guard who said "You can come, but they can't." What got Torreano is that the teens just accepted it. "These are kids who who'll fight people over anything, they'll kill each other over a slice of bread," he says. "But they were perfectly accepting of the idea that they just didn't belong there. To me that was a fight that really should have been fought."

"If you treat them as less than human for a long enough time, they'll eventually start to believe you. The fact that the exhibition is at Rhodes will make them realise they can make it there too."

The Amasango photographic exhibition is on at Eden Grove from Monday until Saturday (16 June)."