The colours of the grey streets of Joza came alive for awarenet learners and other local youth who took part in the Photo Walk organised by local newspaper Grocotts Mail. Grocott's Photo Walk is a joint cooperation with The Stand community newspaper in Syracuse, New York where the two distant communities share photographs and stories.
After an interesting introduction on photography composition and colours by Grocotts' photo journalist James we were all let loose on the streets of local township Joza and its unsuspecting passers-by.
We saw funeral participants draped in formal black attire with white clouds in the background. Married women in patterned blue makoti dresses walked by balancing green vegetables dignifiedly on their heads. Saturday revellers in suits and rags drank whiskey next to newly washed upmarket cars, water drops still shining on their surface. Boys and girls sat in couples behind curled barbed wire in front of houses painted in all imaginable colours, chatting nonchalantly about life in the bright sunshine. Mothers hang small, big, pink, blue, yellow and red clothes on lines while their children played on the ruins of half-demolished neighbouring houses. The usual array of donkeys, cows, goats grazed the streets while skinny half-starved dogs in all shades of brown roamed the neighbourhood looking for that elusive bone.
In short, we saw everything we usually see in the streets of Joza but having put on the hat of the photographer it all as by magic suddenly looked different. We saw that a small area in an ordinary township can contain endless variations of life, colour and beauty and that if you look carefully you can capture it in a simple photo.
The best photographs we took will be exhibited in Syracuse, New York. We are therefore all excited to have our pictures displayed on the other side of the world, it makes us realise that the colours and life of our local neighbourhood can be of interest to the rest of mankind!
