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AFP partners with new photojournalism school in Rio’s City of God
AFP, which ran a successful photography training project for children in Rio’s city of god in the run-up to the World Cup, is partnering with a new photography school in the favela. The School, which will be free of charge to students, will be inaugurated on November 20.
Over the two years leading up to the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Casa Geraçao da Cidade de Deus will teach 12 to 18 year olds to shoot and edit photos.
The courses will be run by the charitable association ModaFusion and AFP’s photo manager for Brazil Christophe Simon. It is a continuation of the Olhar Bom de Bola photo project in which 18 children from the City of God captured their everyday passion for football in pictures over the year leading up to the World Cup. The images were distributed by AFP and published by dozens of prestigious titles worldwide, including Paris Match. These publications contributed money to fund the continuation of the project.
The images were featured in an exhibition at the Visage Pour l’Image photo festival in Perpignan, southern France, in September.
Under the partnership, AFP will transfer all of the donations to ModaFusion for the training of 30 budding young photojournalists who will cover the preparations for the Games.
Theoretical and practical instruction in photography and photo editing will be given by Christophe Simon and photographer Tony Barros, who grew up in the City of God. The two already worked together on the football project. Professional photojournalists from other media in Rio will be invited to donate their time and assist in the project. The students will use cameras provided by Nikon and will edit their photos on AFP computers.
The courses will be organised in six-month modules in groups of ten. The first group comprises five boys and five girls.
The team:
- Tony Barros and Nadine Gonzalez, co-founder of ModaFusion, have worked together since 2006 on the production of fashion events involving favela children in Rio, elsewhere in Brazil and abroad.
- Christophe Simon, AFP photo manager for Brazil, together with Nadine Gonzalez, launched the “Olhar Bom de Bola” project last year in collaboration with Tony Barros.
- Casa Geração is a fashion school created by ModaFusion, a not for profit association founded in 2005 by Nadine Gonzalez and Andrea Fasanello. Its mission is to provide career opportunities to disadvantaged young people from Rio’s favelas by training them in the various professions of the fashion industry. Casa Geraçao Cidade de Deus will be a new branch dedicated to photojournalism.
About AFP
AFP is a global news agency delivering fast, accurate, in-depth coverage of the events shaping our world from conflicts to politics, sports, entertainment and the latest breakthroughs in health, science and technology. With 2,260 journalists spread across almost every country, AFP covers the world 24 hours a day in six languages. AFP delivers the news in video, text, photos, multimedia and graphics to a wide range of customers including newspapers and magazines, radio and TV channels, web sites and portals, mobile operators, corporate clients as well as public institutions.