It seems to have happened so quickly, but Easter season is once again upon us. Frenzied mobs of Fotokids will be out taking literally thousands of photographs of processions, streets draped in colorful deeply hued sawdust carpets, little boys posing as the12 apostles with conical flowered headdresses and the traditional participation of Maximon, the Mayan god. Semana Santa is the season of wonderful, creative imagery! Easter in Santiago Atitlan, the Indigenous village where we have one of our schools, is permeated with magic realism, where the traditional Catholic and old Mayan religion intermingle.
First, the good news!
I hope you had a chance to open the staff’s monthly update with the photos of the kids practicing their skills. Every month the staff will send out an update, mainly pictorial (not much reading required unlike this newsletter).
The Exhibit in Chennai India, “What makes me Click” opened in late January with children’s photographs from Cambodia, Turkey, Singapore, Gaza, London, Thessaloniki Greece, Brussels, New York City, South Africa and of course India. The exhibition, designed by The Architecture Story, was curated by the CPB Foundation and the Children’s Photography Archive based in the United Kingdom
The exhibit will close later this month and, by all accounts, is a rousing success and attended by thousands!
I hope you had a chance to open the staff’s monthly update with the photos of the kids practicing their skills.
Next year will be our 35th anniversary. It may seem like we just celebrated our 30th, but the pandemic interceded to slow our exhibition plans. I won’t tell you yet what we propose to do in celebration, but will mention that we do have a planned exhibit at Lab Gallery, part of SUNY’s SEJI (Social and Environmental Justice Institute), mid-March till early May of 2026.
This May I will be going to London to meet with our UK supporters and maybe drum up interest in an exhibition. We have exhibited at least four times in the UK in the past. I will also be giving a presentation at Frontline, the London press Club, date TBD.
Since the December newsletter, we marked the holidays with a Christmas distribution of turkeys and rice to each child’s family– 90 turkeys in all and 5 pounds of rice to each family.
We also graduated two classes of students, one that had been with us for 8 years in Santiago Atitlan, and another that had been with us for 5 years in the City.
