So can you talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea of Foundry?
Basically I just came out of what I saw was a void in the, I guess, I guess the
journalism industry today, photography industry in general in affordable
workshops. There's a lot of workshops I thought it'd be great to take but there's
just no way for college students, teachers, for a lot of people over the
world, particularly in the developing world to take, and there's just simply no
way that two, three, four thousand dollars and there's plus travel and so
it's workshops seem very elitist and so the idea of Foundry was well let's
create something that's going to train locals in visual narrative
storytelling so they can tell their own stories. That's really what it really
came down to is let's create a workshop. It's affordable for most anyone and we'll
do our best to bring as many people as we can in through scholarships, the
tuition is reduced for locals, it's always half of the regular price, wherever we go
try and bring in as many locals as many people as we can to affect. It's all
about affecting people. This year we have 129 students. Last year we had about the
same the year before we had 140 so it's it's great. It's moving around the world and
always bumps but it's generally speaking I think training a lot of people to tell
their own stories and that is the ultimate goal. We want people who wouldn't
normally be able to come to learn, tell their own stories. It's not so important
to me that they become professional photojournalists. Some will. I may be
estimated a third but then I'm more interested that they can tell community
stories, personal stories that they can tell the stories of what's going on in
their community because they know it. They live there. It's their home, it's
their world. I guess in a way that's it's counterintuitive. It's putting the
fly-in and fly-out photojournalists out of business because the people here
already have the training they can tell their own stories. We don't need to fly
people on but that's the essence I guess. That's the essence of foundry. For five
years it's I think getting better and people are telling me it's getting
better so we have no intention of quitting. But it's definitely it's been a learning
process to come into industries and outsider and try to make it work. Try to
make it work on all volunteers, limited budget, etc. You know there's a reason
$4,000 head workshops work well. We'll have substantially more help influence
money etc. But we make it work and it would make it work because of the
volunteers. I don't percent my faculty and staff are the reason the workshop
works and that's just every year that without them it'd be impossible. It would
not be possible.
