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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Power through photos

LUNENBURG — Powerful photos line G. Ryan Ansin's studio walls — a pensive face peering from behind a hospital wall, a prosthetic leg showing a Cambodian child's visualization of fear side-by-side with sneakers in a star formation, an American child's visual depiction of fun.

The photos were taken by his students from Cambodia and Massachusetts; the students from Cambodia were patients at an amputee rehabilitation center and a sex trafficking rescue center.

The 23-year-old founder of EPHAS (Every Person Has A Story) Productions is on a plane to Rwanda today to start up an educational media arts program at Karambi High School and at a local hospital in Gitwe.

Mr. Ansin and his team will teach between 80 and 100 students the basics of digital photography in advance of the installation of a clean water system that will service more than 250,000 people in the Gitwe area.

The students will document the immediate and long-term health and cultural impacts clean water will bring to Gitwe's residents.

“They now have to walk 11.6 kilometers to a source of relatively clean water, a river, and then back again,” Mr. Ansin said.

After the workshop program is completed, Mr. Ansin and his students will be going on that 11.6 km walk, photographing and talking with people on the way.

Why photography?

Mr. Ansin, an internationally experienced photographer who has made videos for nonprofits, including Veterans International, Epic Arts, Rural Black Women's Rights and others, began making films as a 7-year-old at Fitchburg's Applewild School and then learned about photography at Lawrence Academy.

At 15, he was invited to join a trip to view the rehabilitation centers that the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundations started in Cambodia and Vietnam and found the work to which he has dedicated himself ever since.

He was asked to make a film of the trip, a film that was shown at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

“I took a year and a half off after high school and traveled the U.S., Cambodia and the Cayman Islands doing promotional videos for nonprofits, which were successful in raising money,” Mr. Ansin said.

After graduating from Emerson College, he went back to his roots in photography and started developing an educational media arts program with his past experiences in mind.

“I needed to make changes in the way I was helping. Here are these people being faced with a white male, another guy holding a big mike in their faces, telling them to move this way and asking questions through a translator; I didn't think it was an honest depiction of life in those villages,” he said.

So he decided to teach people to document their own experiences, to empower them to record their feelings with digital photography.

During his three weeks in Rwanda, students will first learn the basics of taking a photograph with a point-and-shoot digital camera.

“Then what I think of as the best part of the workshop, the students will be paired up and then sent out to find another person who has never taken a picture who they will teach. Afterward we go over the pictures together and usually find a few that are very good and they will proudly say ‘my student took that picture.' It helps them to gain confidence,” he said.

During the instruction period, a local artist/assistant is also learning how to run workshops. That assistant oversees the program, downloads pictures and sends them back to Mr. Ansin, who selects photos that best represent the location and puts them online for the public to view.

The pictures will eventually be sold at galleries in the United States for fundraising purposes. All of the proceeds will directly benefit the workshop location programs and the hosting organization.

In the Rwanda program, 75 percent of the funds will benefit the educational program to purchase additional equipment and continue instruction. The remaining 25 percent will be sent to Medical Missions for Children co-founder Andrew Kurban's 1For3 organization for a piping and purification water system for the area.

The Rwandan students can continue to access the program and use the equipment by donating their time to help new students.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, Mr. Ansin will begin to expand his school program with the help of author Loung Ung. Her two books, “First They Killed My Father” and “Lucky Child” are on the curriculum of 250 schools nationwide.

“When she is invited to speak at these and other schools she will be talking about our program. It's important to connect the hosting organizations like Veterans International and 1For3 back here.

“We hear about suicide bombings and atrocities on a daily basis, but it's not the only things that are happening in the developing world. I was lucky to be invited to Cambodia at a young age, and if I can give students here the same eye-opening experience without having to travel, well, it would help the hosting organizations become sustainable, and perhaps bring philanthropy to our kids at a young age,” Mr. Ansin said.

Mr. Ansin is planning a return trip to Cambodia later this year and will begin start-up programs to benefit reconstruction in Haiti, focus on gangs and teen violence in the Dominican Republic, schools/orphanages/soccer in Vietnam and rape in the Congo and Brazil, and a return trip to Rwanda scheduled for 2011.

“It's all about giving people a voice in their community,” Mr. Ansin said.

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