The training course.

 

Seeing for Ourselves, through its former member Chelsea Davis now embedded at the New York City Department of Probation (DOP), enrolled clients of the agency and community members in a free twelve-week workshop/training course.  Participants were given free digital single-lens reflex cameras donated by Sigma while also making use of their own cellphone cameras.   Classes were held on weekday late afternoons and early evenings.  Each week a different facet of photography was covered, which participants would then practice when roaming their communities and other NYC locales taking photos.  During the spring of 2018, classes were held in Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, and Brownsville; in the fall, classes in Harlem and the South Bronx were supplemented by an advanced course in Bed-Stuy taught by graduates of the earlier course. Topics included photographic inspiration, creating a narrative, objective documentary, subjective documentary, and those pictured below. Photographic excursions took students to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, music salons around the city, and New York Fashion Week, while photographers also participated in paid photo shoots at both John McEnroe's ProAm Tournament in the Hamptons and the Piano Studio in Midtown.

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In 2019 and 2020, courses continued, expanding to Queens and Staten Island.  Then the 2020 pandemic drove courses online.