The workshop

The workshops were formed by an average of ten photographers chosen by their local organizations: peasant communities, district organizations and unions. Those cover an area with similar issues and concerns.

The workshops were constituted as organizations with their own and unique structure. The same members had to elect leaders and internal delegates. With this, the workshops were meant to be independent in their functioning and, that way, TAFOS just needed to be in charge of the training and giving support, but not of the decisions taking.

The goal of this type of functioning intended to give the active members the need to assume the chore to photograph, not as an external demand, but an internal need in relation to their issues and concerns. Most of the time, the workshops ran by their own, with one or maximum two reunions a month with TAFOS. This way the members of each workshop had to develop a personal capability to take decisions by their own.

Educational process

The workshop's methodology was very simple, in each reunion the talk was about two specific topics: the technical teaching and the communication tasks. All the learning about aspects concerning technique, took place in the practice. When a new photographer joined the workshop, he was given a fully automatic photographic camera (a Yashica T3 or a Nikon L35-AF), with minimum indications about framing, light and film changing.

Inside his community, the photographer had to make a photographic record of whatever he considered important in his reality. Then, he had to hand over the processed negatives, put on a contact plate, so the workshop could evaluate the results. There, the things the photographer looked up in his pictures and the things he truly achieved in the photography were discussed. A dialogue about the usage of the camera was introduced, as well as one about the thematic contents in the pictures. This way, the workshop started working about themes related to the life and the reality of the members and their communities.