The photography workshops are starting! As this week in spring break here in Quinhagak, we had a pretty small turn out for our first day. I think many of our young photographers weren't sure if we were starting this Monday or next. So for our first day, instead of starting with only a few people and having to repeat, we decided to brush up on our Yup'ik language skills. At first there was only three of us, but then the count went up to five. Together we listened to Anna Jacobson's Yup'ik Phrase and Conversation Lessons. There were lots of words and phrases that we didn't know, so it was fun to spend some time getting more familiar with the language. If you want to study the Yup'ik language this is a great resource http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/publications/detail/index.xml?id=22
After the small turn out on day one, we spread word of mouth and on the VHF that we were indeed having photography this week. This time we had 12 Quinhagak youth ready to learn about taking pictures. :) During this workshop we are going to create photo essays telling a story comparing past Yup'ik life to present Yup'ik life, we call this photographic time traveling. We learned in order to make a good picture story we have to plan out what we are going to take shots of and what we want to say. So today started our planning phase. We looked at some of the pictures of the artifacts from Nunalleq, some of the 3D printed models, and at pictures in Yup'ik books. Each of us is choosing a theme to make our story about. We read a bit about our topics in the books (all of which are on the Resources page), so that we knew more about Yupiit in the past.
