May 16th, 2008:  For the latest news please go to www.shootbacknow.org.

Many thanks to Lana Wong and Shootback for all their help in our marketing strategy.

Coaches across Continents is working to promote the relaunch of the Shootback book on its ten year anniversary and using the amazing Shootback photos to show our own story.

The Shootback Project - set up by Lana Wong.

Children have vivid and important stories to tell, and cameras are dynamic tools for this expression. American photographer Lana Wong started the Shootback Project to help give young people in Mathare the means to tell their own stories. In August 1997, under the auspices of Africa’s largest youth sports and development NGO, the Mathare Youth Sports Association (www.mysakenya.org) and with support from the Ford Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Wong and youth leader Francis Kimanzi started teaching photography and writing to a group of 31 boys and girls, aged 12 to 17. The kids had never held cameras before.

Equiped with 30 dollar plastic cameras the Shootback Team photographed their lives and wrote about them every week for almost 2 years. The results 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 in London with an exhibition that toured around the world.

The Shootback Project continues to train young photographers in Mathare today and their photos are displayed both in the slum and in international shows. Amongst the original members of the Shootback Team, there are some remarkable stories of inspiration and hope, a decade after the start of the project. One student, Mohamed, is the first Shootback student to attend university - he is in London doing a BA in Media/Communication Studies while also shooting red carpet celebrity pictures for a photo agency; another, James, is a staff photographer for Kenya’s largest newspaper. Julius is now working as a photographer for the UN in Nairobi and has also started his own foundation (www.mwelu.org/about) to continue the legacy of youth empowerment through photography that Shootback started. The incredible story of Julius’ transformation from a drug-using gang member to a role model and rising star of Kenyan photojournalism is inspiring testimony that the intervention of a grassroots development project can indeed change individual lives.

An exhibition in Paris with French designer agnès b. to commemorate Shootback’s tenth anniversary is planned for Spring 2008.

Excerpt from the Epilogue by Lana Wong in Shootback : Photos by Kids from the Nairobi Slums, (Booth-Clibborn Editions, London 1999)

Every time it rains in Nairobi, especially during the rainy season when the sky unleashes enough water for a small sea, I think of my friends in the slum around the edge of town. Trying to avoid the litter, sewage and shards of glass scattered across slum paths is hard enough in the day. ‘Try it in the dark, in the rain, and without shoes,’ my friend Kim once said to me with a grin as we leapt across a blocked drainage pit.

Most of my friends in Mathare, Nairobi’s largest and poorest slum, survive without many of the things I take for granted. They do not have toilets, running water, electricity or a good pair of shoes. Working people are lucky if they earn sixty Kenyan shillings (roughly one US dollar) a day. Crammed into one-room shacks with sheets hanging from the ceiling as room dividers, families are large, with five to ten children. Single mothers run the majority of households. Many fathers have left or died, perhaps from AIDS or one of the other illnesses that plague the slum.

This is the Nairobi that most tourists do not see. Many local Kenyans, expatriates and wazungus (white people) do not see these areas either, because the slums are no-go zones. The only stories they hear about ‘notorious Mathare’ involve violence, drugs and prostitution.Most are told or written by outsiders. But as the kids’ photographs in this book show, this is not the whole story.

As a photographer, I have always struggled with issues of access, ownership and subjectivity within the documentary tradition. My reason for first visiting Mathare was a freelance job : an assignment to photograph a youth group which is also Africa’s largest youth football league – the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA). Just off of Juja Road, the main artery that links the vast Mathare slums to downtown Nairobi, I met a group of kids playing soccer with balls made of plastic bags, waste papers and string. They were obsessed with football and aspired to be the Zidanes of the future. Football could be their way out.

I started hanging out with these kids, watching young boys and girls play football barefoot on dusty pitches covered with rubbish and stones. I photographed their weekly community clean-ups and listened to their peer counsellors tell friends about the dangers of drugs and AIDS. I was struck by the quiet strength and hope of these kids who, despite dire living conditions, dreamed of becoming football stars, lawyers and doctors.

The promise of these kids inspired me to follow the lead of photographers like Jim Hubbard, Wendy Ewald and Nancy McGuirre, all of whom have demonstrated photography’s power with disadvantaged young people around the world. Their work has shown that kids have vivid and important stories to tell, and cameras are dynamic tools for this expression. I hoped to teach the MYSA footballers a new skill : shooting with cameras. Thirty-one kids who had never touched cameras before were given basic 35mm point-and-shoots and a roll of film per week. Some had never even heard of the word photography.

In September 1997, Francis Kimanzi – aka ‘Kim’, a MYSA youth leader and top striker on Mathare United, the professional slum football team - began working with me to teach photography and writing skills to a group of boys and girls, aged twelve to seventeen, selected from the MYSA youth teams. During our weekly sessions at the MYSA office, we watched shy kids bewildered by these strange plastic machines transform into confident young photographers, emboldened by their new talent and the attention their pictures have generated in Kenya and abroad.

Throughout this process, the Shootback Team has repeatedly humbled me with their vision and perspectives. Although I have spent three years working in Mathare, the intimacy and insight these youths have on their own lives is something I cannot replicate. Collins Omondi, a wry seventeen year-old, expressed it well when he wrote in his Shootback journal, ‘There is no difference between us and the other photographers ; The only difference is that they shoot and we shoot back.’

http://www.daneldon.org/inspired/wong/lanawong.htm

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.

Shootback : Photos by Kids from the Nairobi Slums is currently out of print. If you are interested in helping to support the reprint of this unique and valuable document or helping in any other way, please contact :

Lana Wong

photographer and founder of the Shootback Project

lanawong@yahoo.com