Salut! Files

Shootback

 

Shootback : Photos by Kids from the Nairobi Slums

10th Anniversary Exhibition

7- 21 May 2008

agnès b.

17 rue Dieu, Paris 75010

Ten years after the Shootback kids took their first pictures of life in Nairobi’s notorious Mathare slum, agnès b. is proud to present the original Shootback exhibition, never seen before in France, with new work from these young photographers.

Celebrity photos taken on the red carpet of London film premières sit alongside graphic new images from the recent violence in Kenya. Combined with its unique perspective of daily life in one of Africa`s largest slums, the Shootback exhibition takes  the viewer on an unexpected journey to places where tourists don’t normally go.

The pictures and words of these talented photojournalists attest to the power of photography to transform the lives of disadvantaged youth.

Children have vivid and important stories to tell, and cameras are dynamic tools for this expression.  American photographer Lana Wong started the Shootback Project in August 1997 to help give young people in Mathare the means to tell their own stories.  Equipped with 30 dollar plastic cameras, a group of 31 boys and girls, aged 12 to 17 photographed their lives and wrote about them every week for almost two years.

The results, from kids who had never held cameras before, were honest, raw, amusing and beautiful- these visceral images became the basis of a 200-page book called Shootback : Photos by Kids from the Nairobi Slums   ( Booth-Clibborn Editions, London 1999). The book was launched at the Barbican Centre, London with an international touring exhibition. Venues included the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC ; Staff USA Gallery, New York ; Festival Mundial, Tilburg, the Netherlands ; Bildungszentrum der Handwerkskammer, Berlin ; and Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine de Bamako, Mali.

The Shootback Project was set up under the auspices of the Mathare Youth Sports Association (www.mysakenya.org) with support from the Ford Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).  It continues to train young photographers in Mathare today and their photos are displayed both in the slum and in international shows.

From the original Shootback group, there are inspiring stories which demonstrate that the intervention of a grassroots development project can indeed change individual lives. These personal stories of hope and recent work produced by Shootback members who are now professional photographers are a highlight of the exhibition.

Ten years after taking his first photos with the Shootback Project, 22 year-old Julius Mwelu now has an impressive list of group and solo photo exhibitions to his name, a book of his own photographs published, experience as a cameraman (he shot a video diary of his life that became the basis of the documentary film Shoot Back ! produced by Prounen Films, Germany) and last year, was invited to be ‘artist in residence’ at the Vrije Academie in The Hague. He now works as a photographer for the UN humanitarian news service IRIN In Nairobi.

Julius recently created the Mwelu Foundation (www.mwelu.org) to continue the legacy of youth empowerment through photography that Shootback started. Every Saturday, Julius teaches kids in Mathare how to take pictures so they have a voice to tell their own stories. Julius is living proof that this creative process can have a remarkable and sustainable impact.

Born in Mogadishu in 1984, Mohammed Dahir moved to Nairobi as a refugee in 1989. He is now the first member of his family and the first student from Shootback to attend university. He currently lives in London where he is completing a BA in Media Practice, Digital Imaging and Graphic Design. He also shoots paparazzi pictures for a London agency and works part-time as the Photography Director for an East African magazine called SHEEKO.

James Njuguna is a staff photographer for Kenya’s largest daily newspaper, the Daily Nation.

Collins Omondi, 26, won a scholarship to study photography in Norway and  returned to Nairobi to manage the Shootback Project. He started his own youth development organisation in a neighboring slum called Dandora which he continues to direct today.

Peter Ndolo, 22, is the current youth leader of the Shootback Project (a paid staff position with MYSA) and a freelance photographer and videomaker.

Pauline Awour, 23, Vinick Kemuma, 20, Ali Barisa, 23, Saidi Hamisi, 24, and more than half of the original 31 Shootback members are now  trained in videomaking and actively documenting daily life in the Nairobi slums through an offshoot project of Shootback called Slum-TV (www.slum-tv.org). A selection of the best youth-produced Slum-TV ‘newsreels’ will be featured in the exhibition.

A screening of Shoot Back ! , an 83-minute documentary shot and directed by 4 Shootback members (Julius Mwelu, Fred Otieno, Maureen Atieno and Serah Odeke) and produced by Prounen Films, Germany will be held on (tbc) May 2008.

Lana Wong was born in New York and studied fine art/photography at Harvard University and the Royal College of Art, London. She moved to Kenya in 1996 and worked in East Africa as a photographer for various UN agencies. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and she has worked as a television presenter (BBC), photographic curator and teacher. She is currently based in Paris/

Adrian McNally: Winterset's invisible member

Adrian McNally's name crops up in both the Mudcat debate on Rachel Unthank and the Winterset and my interview with Rachel for Salut! Live. The exchanges at Mudcat prompted him to offer these thoughts of his own:

I was watching a programme about JK Rowling recently, and she was asked whether she felt lucky that all this had happened to her. She gave it some thought and said that she felt lucky that she'd had the idea in the first place, and that when you have a really good idea, all the details just fall into place. This is very much how I feel about the Winterset. The vision I had of the band, from before we even started working together, was such a eureka moment, that every decision and direction since has been easy. All we have to do is look at the blueprint and ask if it fits. That pivotal, central idea was to afford Rachel and Becky a soundscape that they could sing completely independently of. I wanted them to be able to sing just as they would unaccompanied, as traditional singers do, without having to worry about staying in time with other players. Rather than seeing the music as accompaniment, I wanted to create a reflective, musical alter-discourse to their songs. Two narratives running side by side. Eerily detached accompaniments, at once abstract and unobtrusive. The result is hopefully something that sounds at once traditional and progressive, honest and abstract, simple and complex. But the blueprint also took in the scope of music listeners we might reach with this approach to folk music, which was where the real excitement came in. I don't mean that in a commercial sense. I'm very interested in the health of folk music and frequently feel frustrated by the way it is perceived from the outside, which for the most part I feel is the responsibility of some on the inside. Communicating folk music with a traditional core to the wider music listening public is what it's all about to me. A former director of the South Bank Show spoke to me at a show recently. He was into leftfield music, like Antony & The Johnsons, Jim O'Rourke and Robert Wyatt, while his partner was a Dido/KT Tunstall fan. The Winterset was the first band they had ever agreed on. At our Folk Awards warm up show last week, there was one of our biggest fans, sat there with his Winterset obsessed eight-year-old daughter. Emails of support and encouragement come from the Elliott Family at one end (the Elliotts of Birtley - probably the most respected and important carriers of folk music in the North East) and from Robert Wyatt at the other. Playing in your local folk club one night, and then to London's culture vultures the next, getting unaccompanied mining songs broadcast on cutting edge 6 Music, didn't ought to be possible, but it's possible to communicate anything with honesty. Though there are many reasons why the band works, the gold at the centre is the natural honesty in Rachel and Becky and their commitment to music and songs first and foremost. They are innocence without ignorance, sincere without sentiment. We can be bold and experimental with the arrangements, because there is always something very true at the core of it. Charlie Mingus said you can't improvise on nothing. You have to learn and understand a musical genre, history or discipline, before you improvise with it. In much the same way that Peter Kay’s satire of the working class is underpinned by pathos and the sort of deep understanding it’s only possible to have by being one of them, Rachel Unthank and The Winterset subvert folk music with love and authority. Truth be told, Rachel and Becky would much rather be sat in a singaround than on stage at Glastonbury, and I hope their sincerity towards folk music breaths through the records, no matter how leftfield the arrangements. I came up with the people to play for Rachel and Becky, I've spent the last three years of my life working for peanuts around the clock to provide a consistent artistic vision from arrangements through to marketing (and to allow them to grow without having to find money for professionals!), I challenge and push them artistically and emotionally, to turn good music into great music, I bring production and narrative ideas to the table, born out of an obsessive love for music, I write whole arrangements like Felton Lonnin, and do my best to protect and nuture them as emerging artists in a quickly changing industry.... but it's all as servant. Whatever I've got to give, I want to spend it on Rachel and Becky. I am in awe of, and inspired by their basic nature, and it a genuine honour and privilege to work for them, and to be entrusted to oversea their musical soundscape. All I'm here to do is to try and capture them, and provide the environment for them to express themselves most truely. For me, the idea of the band was so strong, it was only a matter of time before reaching an optimum creative period such as The Bairns. In Belinda, we had someone with great technique and a very quick mind capable of transforming ideas into reality. Niopha was the key element that gave The Bairns a harder edge than Cruel Sister, and she was instrumental in preventing the playing from sounding too classical. She is also the best band team player I have come across in 20 years of doing this. During the process of making Cruel Sister and The Bairns, Rachel and Becky have developed a open-mindedness and sense of imagination that will ensure that whatever we do in the future, it won't be dull. Their sense of adventure and preference for direct and powerful music has as much to do with being brought up on no nonsense singers like Sheila Stewart, The Wilsons, Dick Gaughan and the shanty singers of the North East, as it does the contemporary music they have become interested in over recent years. I wanted to comment on the EMI/folk puppets assertions too, which I'll do very briefly. This band has a manager, agent, label, sound engineer, producer, publicist and tour manager who is one person. That person is also Rachel's partner. We couldn't be more homemade. Realistically, there was only so far I could take them. Some people are lucky or astute enough to have enough infrastructure around them to stay independent. Kate Rusby has stayed independent with half her family working behind the scenes, which is a tremendous show of will power and tenacity. We're not in that sort of position. Teaming up with EMI is a simple matter of delegation. They have the infrastucture to sell the album. We don't. By the time we had teamed up with them, we'd already made The Bairns, on a shoestring budget. The album might be licensed to EMI, but we recorded the vocals under our stairs, and the whole thing was recorded on a simple portable Fostex multitrack, and for six months, none of us earned a penny. The irony, given people's assumptions about selling out, is that we are making and stand to make less from this album than on Cruel Sister. But we'd rather make £x from selling 50,000 albums than make the same from selling 5000. Communicating music is our main motivation. Although we made the album before EMI's involvement, I don't feel any need or desire to play down our relationship with them. They have been just great with us, they haven't meddled a bit, and have been supportive on a personal level, as well as business, in all sorts of ways. Clearly, EMI aren't going to make their millions out of us, and in general, it depresses that people are so often ready to slate anyone in the industry who comes between the artist and the fan, as if any of this could be possible without the hard work of many people. It's like going into a shop and resenting everyone who stood in between you and the hen that laid your half a dozen eggs. Sure, the record industry is in trouble, and much of that is down to a disparity in fairness between labels and acts that goes back decades, but that relationship has always allowed many a brilliant artist to grow and flourish. In the end, our only motivation is to find ways of communicating our music to as many people as possible, or at least to generate the opportunity for them to hear it.