SHOW ME YOUR LIFE

Show Me Your Life gives video cameras to at-risk children and adolescents. Often, the photographs kids at-risk take are not what "nice" people want to see; they are essentially invisible as the child at-risk is invisible. The kids work with Tim Barrus to create video and photography that symbolizes how they live their lives. Many of these kids are surviving doing sex work. They are from all over the planet. They can be the children in wars, in prisons, or homeless children living on the street. Kids are from République démocratique du Congo, Myanmar, South Africa, India, Nigeria, Thailand, Cambodia, Paris, South America, Australia. At-risk can mean no parents, addiction to glue, much violence, no home, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and Post Traumatic Stress. We usually see their worlds from the view of an adult journalist. We need to understand that landscape from the eyes of the kid who survives in it. The "goal" here has nothing whatsoever to do with an audience. It has to do with getting kids who face enormous odds to express themselves. In whatever form that might take. Form, structure, narrative, history, and culturally imbued identity are irrelevant here. What is relevant is the idea of the child -- or the adolescent as a young adult -- expressing and reinventing himself.

-- tim barrus

• Umthombo is a South African NGO in Durban that deals with homeless, South African children, many of whom are at risk for HIV. We give small video cameras to at-risk street children who show us their lives.