Day one with our kids

They love being photographed!

After a couple days of settling in and getting acquainted with the wonderful people we are collaborating with at SLWCS, we met our class. We will be working with 20 polite and lively 9 and 10 year olds who were very excited to meet us. The school consists of two open air rooms and sits on the grounds of a Buddhist temple. The Sinhalese people of this area are mainly a Buddhist population, and the religion resonates throughout the culture here.

On our first day with the children, our translator called in sick (things don't always work out as planned here in Sri Lanka)! So to get to know the children and to break through the language barrier, we started with a wordless picture book called Flotsam. In this book, a boy discovers an underwater camera that has washed up to shore. Upon developing the film, images from under the sea and portraits from around the world are revealed. We hope that this visual story translated the idea that photography is a universal language, and we can learn about the world and connect with each other through photographs.

Ayomika, 10

Sampath, 9

Taking a cue from this book, we then had the children take portraits of each other, print, and then take the next portrait with the previous portrait in hand. The result was a picture in a picture in a picture... a repetitive activity to get to know their names and for them to get to know the cameras and printer. The kids could not get enough of seeing their images on the LCD and watching them print! Their excitement was overwhelming. For the complete set of their portraits, click here.

Anil looking at Flotsam

We ended our first morning with some free shooting around the school and temple grounds. This must have been the most fun part of their day. They were all over photographing insects, flowers, each other, the principal, murals... anything that that they came across! Tomorrow (with help from a translator!) we will show them some of their images, learn some English words for the objects that they shot today, and talk about our first assignment.

An interesting local insect.

Photographing the younger class on the playground.