The power of digital storytelling …

As we speak duckrabbit partner in crime David White is somewhere on the streets of Bristol helping  disadvantaged kids to express something about their lives through photography.

It’s the kind of work we love because all the bullshit that surrounds daily life gets stripped away and replaced with another set of bullshit, an alternative reality that is the lives these kids live. Some people will say it’s more ‘real’; usually the middle class types who like to get down and dirty with drug addicts so they can photograph them.

That’s bollocks.

It’s just a different kind of ‘real’ to your own.

Maybe the next up and coming photographer who decides to spend their summer photographing smackheads could instead give them cameras and get them to spend the summer photographing the lives of your average middle class Joe (or duckrabbit). Now that I’d like to see, but don’t expect to see it on foto8 any time soon!

Back to the kids.  Hanging with them you can’t help but think that in some way society is failing. Why?  Because it gives up on kids that have so much left to give, so much to say. And in the end the cost always comes back on us when we end up banging these kids up, labeling them failures, putting them in a box that says ‘THEM’ whilst we sit in one that says ‘US’.

Media is hell of way to get people to engage with the world. Its not all about high production values.  Expression is a necessity in a society that applauds individualism.  Give kids a camera and some will do work that stands out, that makes them feel good about themselves, if not their lives. Leave them with only a brick to play with and they’ll soon send it through a window.

Why these thoughts now?  Ten minutes ago I came across a blog called Teacher, revised.  They’ll you’ll find a massively enthusiastic post with the title ‘Digital Storytelling, Some Kind of Wonderful’: Go on, off you go.

‘I’m even happier to report the audio slideshow unit went over remarkably well—especially considering its inauspicious beginning.

All ten groups successfully completed a 2-3 minute audio slideshow. They edited the audio with GarageBand, the pictures with Photoshop, and the slideshow with Soundslides. I’ve never seen a roomful of teenagers so disinclined to play weird shooting games, look at Prom dresses, or Google image search Anime characters. These kids were focused.’

Related posts:

1. My talk at Digital Storytelling 10
2. digital storytelling ’10
3. Seeing and believing (the real power of photography to change) us