After visiting Rural Nepal with the Reach for Nepal Foundation in October 2017, I wanted to do something concrete and tangible to help the Shahid Hari Prasad Adarbhut School we visited. The school principal was very grateful for the foundation's support and the help rebuilding the school... but one of his greatest concerns was that half the children come to school hungry and have no lunch, due to the poverty in the area. He wanted to have enough money to provide lunches to the school children. $4 Australian dollars would cover the cost of feeding one child for an entire month. I created a calendar with all proceeds going to feed these school children... at last count we managed to raise enough money to feed all the children in the school for almost 8 months...
Early in 2017 I began a Documentary Project with Karinya House in Canberra. Karinya is a community based organisation providing supported accommodation, transitional housing and outreach services to pregnant and parenting women who are in crisis...
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Concept: To illustrate and document the humanity and strength of the women who use the services
of Karinya House.
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Goals: To document the women over the course of a number of weeks or months in photographic
form. To create dynamic, touching, intriguing individual portraits of the women. To
present a showcase of the images in a public exhibition with one documentary style photo presented
in conjunction with a portrait to highlight the individual and the potential of the woman
verses the preconception or role they now find themselves in.
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Participant Outcome: I would like the women involved to see themselves in a new light through my lens. The documentary photos will highlight their strength, their love, their connections (perhaps their hopes and their
struggles). And I intend the portraits to be a very stripped back, authentic, capture of the individual, hopefully showing the participants that they are more than their current pressures and they have an identity and a potential outside of their current role (young single mother, marginalised etc).
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Karinya House Outcome: A collection of documentary style photos of the participants at Karinya House. Increased exposure and raised awareness of the support and services offered.
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Public Outcome: I would like to culminate this project in a public exhibition of the works. Ideally this exhibition would raise money for Karinya House, but I think more importantly, it would raise awareness. It would help demonstrate the humanity of the women helped (rather than be a faceless charity for those that don’t know it) and it would hopefully challenge people to rethink their preconceptions.
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