I Am Making a Picture is a year-long, cross-cultural photography project connecting young people from two vastly different contexts: a rural village in northern Germany and an inner-city community in Cape Town, South Africa. Through workshops, dialogue, and collaborative image-making, students aged 16–18, from both schools, explored questions of identity, representation, and the colonial gaze.

I am making a picture

Decolonizing the lens

Photography has been used to define, distort, and dominate—but it can also reclaim and reveal. In this project, students challenged inherited images by documenting the everyday: a grandparent’s barbershop, a kitchen window, the rhythm of their own streets.
Image by Blake Arendse (17)
Delft, CT
Returning the gaze

South African and German students used photography to respond to each other’s lives—not with critique, but with curiosity.
Their images became a visual dialogue, undoing stereotypes and finding unexpected echoes across continents.
Image by Chloe Mitchell (16)
Delft, CT
Global learning and empathy

Empathy begins when people are no longer symbols. Through stories of daily life—music, friendship, fear—students saw one another as full, complex individuals, and found solidarity in shared teenage experience.
Image by Anzio Kaye (17)
Delft
Climate Justice in Context

We explored how climate stories change from place to place. Students chose issues close to home, showing that climate justice begins with personal connection and lived experience.
Image by Gretchon Arendse (17)
Delft, CT

As the South African co-facilitator, I worked with a team to guide students from Rosendaal High School in Delft.

Through photography and dialogue, we explored themes of climate justice, identity, and historical trauma—rooted in African perspectives and personal experience.

Students challenged stereotypical representations, using image exchange and conversation to see both themselves and others with fresh insight.

The project encouraged them to situate their lives within broader histories of place, resistance, and change.