Dear Madam, Dear Sir,
I apply today to the «Lensculture - Street Photography Award» with my project KOUNGO FITINI (Minor Issues) which I am working on since 2013.
This project has been realized in the streets of Bamako, capital of Mali, during 3 journeys. The topic is about the life of Bamako’s street children, growing phenomenon in West Africa.
During my first trip, the first part of this work has been set up in collaboration with a Malian association called « Sinjiya-ton Mali » who aims at social and professional reintegration of children living in the street.
Together with the people in charge of the association, we implemented some photographic workshops which aim for children to be able to reveal a part of their everyday life in the street through pictures, drawings and stories.
The stakeholders of this project were about ten children from 11 to 13 years old. In this group, some children were about to be integrated into the children shelter and some other children were already integrated to the shelter. Girls were not part of the center.
Some cameras were given to the 10 kids and we began some workshops to learn how to use them. I made some individual interviews to add comments to children’s pictures and drawings. Interviews were in the form of free discourses and dialogue that were used to caption the booklets.
During my second trip, I kept working on the project with 3 children who had left the association to return to the street. As I lost track of them, I started searching for them in the streets of Bamako. Once I had found them, I continued with the workshops and interviews but this time in the places where they were living.
During my third trip, I took a number of portraits of Bamako’s street children with the help of the three kids I had been working with during my previous travels. They helped me enormously with this project, as much with suggesting viewpoints as with introducing me to other children. These pictures form a series of nocturnal portraits I took in the Halles of Bamako and other places where we find street children at night. For this serie of pictures, I used some compact portable battery flash ; this special light and the chiaroscuro not come from photo retouching. I let children pose freely in front of the camera according to their wishes.
The project has also given rise to 10 booklets : 8 booklets containing pictures and texts produced by children, 1 booklet containing the pictures I took and 1 lexicon used to contextualise the Malian culture and to provide some definitions to the various terms used by the children in their comments. To realize the 8 first booklets, I selected pictures and stories from the work of the children. I hope to be as accurate as possible to children’s intentions.
I hope this topic and his issues can be spread internationally and that this contest will help for that.
Thank you for your consideration,
Arnold Grojean
