Ashaninka Photography Workshop

Ashaninka Photography Workshop is a photography education project carried out in the Ashaninka do Rio Amônia indigenous community, located in the Brazilian Amazon, on the border with Peru.

The project was developed based on the demand of Ashaninka leaders, who saw photography as a powerful tool to be incorporated into their culture. With this training, they intended to create a collection of images through their own perspective that can be used for the cultural education of young Ashaninkas, for the defense of their territory and their culture and for their communication with other ethnic groups and with the non-indigenous world.

The workshop methodology was developed so that the knowledge acquired by students could be culturally appropriated. The teaching was done in a way that it allowed an education of the gaze, providing an understanding of the basic principles of light and image formation. The workshops dynamics included construction of handcrafted cameras using elements of the Ashaninka culture, photographic processes using natural pigments and drawings with photo developer on photographic paper. These analog photography program was elaborated and applied in the field with the collaboration of the photographer and educator Miguel Chikaoka in 2017.

The 2018 digital photography workshop was held from a crowdfunding campaign. In it, students worked with media processes and learned workflows on community-defined guidelines. Equipment such as digital cameras and laptops were donated. The workshop was assisted by the photojournalist João Roberto Ripper in the elaboration of the methodology and in the field work.