The Moscow Times Presents Second “Create Yourself” Album

The Moscow Times newspaper presents a second album with works produced by children participating in the Create Yourself program. This year the album includes the works of young photographers. Taking good photographs is not as easy as it seems. That is why the children were given lessons and help familiarizing themselves with cameras by Andrian Kolotilin and Vladimir Meshkov, friends of National Geographic magazine and members of the Union of Nature Photographers, and by Sergei Kivrin and Vladimir Byatkin, friends of the Moscow House of Photography. It was a brief introduction, but one that could spark a love for photography that will last their whole lives.

The program organizers also studied along with, and thanks to the children. If last year the children sent in their drawings by post, this year Create Yourself representatives and the photographers paid personal visits to the kids. They showed the children how to turn on the camera and together they looked for an interesting subject to photograph. Sometimes they simply helped the children to hold the camera in their hands. For many of the youngsters, it was the first time they could view the world through a lens and understand that photography is not just pushing down a button, but an art form in itself. Their first pictures were blurry and out of focus, but even in those works it was possible to see the individuality of the children: where they directed their glance, and which details from their surroundings attracted their attention.

The album contains photos taken by the children alongside those taken by the professional photographers. Both sets of photos share a few very important aspects – the desire to preserve the memory of life’s fleeting moments, to use photography for self expression and to convey their understanding of the world.

And who knows – one day, 20 years from now, you might open a catalogue from a famous photo exhibition and run across a familiar name – a child whose works were published in today’s Create Yourself photo album.