El Espectador
The hill going up to El Progreso, a neighborhood near Soacha, southwest of Bogotá, located in the mountainous Heights of Cazucá, becomes intransitive during winter.
The windy road is not paved. From there one can see how the gorge below spits small clouds of infected foam along its stretch. Even though they are white, this guarantees nothing. The midday sun makes them nacreous. The allusion of being before a spectacle of nature disappears at the sight of shanty homes made of cans, cloth and ad posters, suspended by two sticks at the foot of the hillside.
One of those posters has a blurred drawing of Christopher Columbus. The gorge’s infection, the violent erosion of the hills and the militia that surround the zone, make this a difficult neighborhood. Not to mention the lack of public services. Like in many other parts of Colombia, landslides cover the streets in El Progreso, swarming the children.
One hundred and ninety children attend school. One year ago, thirty of them, including Wilson Andrés Rodríguez, received an inexpensive camera and a roll of black and white film. With the package came basic photography instruction and a strict order to not touch the lens. Today, their work is on exhibition at the Soacha Casa de la Cultura, where these photography students are in charge of the retrospective tour.
23-year-old, Alex Fattal, headed the project titled, Shooting Cameras for Peace. Alex contacted Nelson Pájaro, a resident of El Progreso who has been working there since 1997.
Nelson was not very clear at first about the project. He was uncertain about working with cameras, yet this did not stop him from recruiting the thirty children needed to start-up the program.
“They were chosen based primarily on their attitudes. Some children need motivation here. The cameras turned out to be important to them.” Others just volunteered.
Wilson Andrés, 12, knows very well that one kilo of cardboard pays 100 pesos, one kilo of bottles pays 30, and for kilo of aluminum or metal one gets 1000 pesos. These are all recyclable materials. He has fair straight hair, cut horizontally over the forehead. He recycles with his siblings. To get to his school in El Progreso, he must climb down every day from an undetermined point in the hills, which he signals with his hand. The trip takes him nearly an hour on foot. The school is a room in a house filled with desks for thirty or forty students and one hundred ninety seven classmates more. Wilson arrived at this neighborhood displaced by violence. Not too long ago he became a photographer.
In the instruction workshop they took, the participants received a crash course in camera operation, focusing an object and shooting. They later went to Universidad de Los Andes where Magdalena Agüero taught them how to enlarge their photos.
During the workshop, they worked with various themes, including fear, family, memory and future. The result was an excess of seventy images loaded with visionary uniqueness, free of restrictions and amends. For Fattal, that is the grand difference in this work. Customarily, “studies” are conducted about children instead of listening to them. Here, it is they who speak through these photographs.
Fattal is a photographer and a Fulbright Scholar. He came to the country one year ago to conduct an investigation with Colombian graphic reporters and subsequently became involved with Corporacón Fe y Esperanza, a non-profit organization whose efforts seek to better the quality of life in Altos de Cazucá. There, he piloted the program and the photographs he now intends to take on tour to various countries in the world. As of now, the exposition will travel to Medellín. The children stay in the hills.
The first photograph Jenny Mayerlie Prado took was for Professor Nelson. Standing next to her sister, she repeats: do not touch the lens; do not take the roll out. She also made a photograph of her blind brother in the middle of the area they sleep in. Jenny’s face is firm: her eyes are dark and stare into a neutral spot allowing her to answer the questions she is asked -not a word more. She is familiar with the process: she developed and enlarged and accepts she could barley see what she put on the enlarger. Jenny wants to be a photographer. She tries to keep order among her classmates during lunchtime and disappears momentarily.
The day at school in El Progreso includes leisure time. Idleness goes well with the dry land in the hills. ‘Huequito’ is the popular game in town. Fabián holds a coin in his hands while a couple of his fellow photographers join him in surrounding a hole in the dry ground.