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Africa Media Online conducts African Photo Entrepreneur Program for photographers
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Africa Media Online, the parent company of Africanpictures.net, has announced that it has hosted an educational program with a select group of professional photographers called the African Photo Entrepreneur Programme (APEP). The program was created to empower African photographers to become globally competitive and included an initial session with 40 photographers who were invited to the first training session in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg last August. The partipants originate for as far afield as Kenya, Nigeria and Liberia, and were selected from among more than 150 applications in a process that included a portfolio review and in-person interviews.
“We don’t teach photographers how to take pictures,” said David Larsen, Africa Media Online’s Director. “ They don’t get onto the programme unless they know how to do that. What we aim to do is to take them to the next level. So the first training block, the Digital Campus, teaches photographers how to deliver images that are technically at the standard that the global picture industry will accept and how to manage and grow their picture archive over time. The Global Competitiveness Masterclass, on the other hand, is all about getting images to market.”
At the end of the first week participants were given an assignment to determine who would advance to a final stage of the program, the Global Competitiveness Masterclass. The final class which included 27 participants (13 are men and 14 women) was hosted in Pietermaritzburg from Sunday to Thursday, November 9-13.
To make it through the Global Competitiveness Masterclass, the photographers had to undertake an assignment which broke the stereotype of Africa as full of starving, begging and poverty-stricken people. The professional photographers had to “capture the essence of the proud, stylish and technologically-savvy African of today.”
“I was really impressed how many of the photographers applied themselves to the assignment in the midst of their normal work pressures,” said Africa Media Online’s Media Manager, Dominique Le Roux, whose job it was to coach the photographers through the assignment. “Many of them went to extraordinary lengths to set up photo shoots or capture daily life situations that fulfil the brief of capturing the hip and happening emerging black middle class. And on top of it all, every image had to be model released.”
The photographers who completed the program have been invited to submit their work to be sold through africanpictures.net.
Posted in: News, Photographers, Stock Photo Companies
Comments(1)
post a comment »danouko, January 02, 2009 [#]
This is a very good venture. There are thousands of amateur photographers across the urban and villages of African countries who could form a very important part of capturing news and renewing the interest in photography as it used to be in the old days. I still think there is a lack of photographers community networks, financial support to photography as a profession and even the photography classes in schools and colleges and pro-photography clubs are long gone.
I had a project in photography renaissance in Kenya that I could not push beyond the idea level coz of funding.
Yet photography is among a profession in Africa that is so widespread to the village level that any venture would easily go to taking the amateur profession to the next level of improving the image quality and access to technology and a wider more creative market.
It will be very helpful if the “African Photo Entrepreneur Program for photographers” was expanded to other areas and countries in Africa.