Since February 2001 Tim Hetherington, an award-winning young British photographer, has been running photography workshops for young semi-professional photographers living and working mainly in countries within Africa. The workshops aim to enhance existing skills and develop a keener sense of good visual literacy as manifested in photojournalism and documentary practice.

Staged in two parts over ten days, the workshop participants are introduced to current trends and thinking within documentary photography and then led through the process of constructing a visual narrative. Part one invites debate around the photographic essay as documentation and explores the question of subjective and objective interpretation when taking the opening shot to editing work. From the initial formal teaching stage, participants go on to review individual portfolios and after some guidance and advice on possible stories, then develop their own ‘features’. Part two assesses all new material, then edited into an exhibition by the group. Workshops have been successfully run so far in Namibia, Oman, Kenya, Bangladesh and Nigeria with more planned for northern Nigeria and Egypt later in this year.

One recent development of the workshop programme has been the addition of an example of Tim’s own work, Healing Sport, critiqued by the group and used to open up debate surrounding the presentation of the final photo-essay. First shown at the Chobi Mela photography festival in Dhaka in December 2002, Tim’s exhibition seeks to use the language of sport to explore the social and economic landscape of sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than portray people as being needy, downtrodden and oppressed as is commonly seen in the western press, Healing Sport provides a positive arena in which to identify the predicaments in which a fifth of the world population finds itself. The exhibition also manages to break convention by being fly-posted in multiple sets of black and white laser-copies in and around a city-centre in a bid to challenge the merits of a more conventional display in a dedicated gallery space.

For further information please contact Sean Williams