CEDAR was established in 1994. CEDAR works for children and youth coming from the most marginalized and excluded communities in Tamil Nadu. It helps them to realize their creative potentials and ‘agency’ through their alternative art pedagogy. In this, they use the medium of Drawing and Painting, Theatre, Photography and Filmmaking.
Under CEDAR’s Creative Photography Project, children are encouraged to explore the world around them with cameras in hand. What they are asked to focus on is their lived experience and how it guides them to relate with both the natural and social world. In the first place, children choose the location depending on their emotional and cognitive preferences. This anchors them in a particular sense of reality, and a unique aesthetics emerges. This the mainstream cannot articulate easily.
The images of workers the children have chosen to represent try to convey much more than what is readily seen at the surface. They are layered and compel you to look beyond. They convey how work life in the margins, subjects humans to thoughtless routine, physical distress, agony, fatigue and wasting away. Conscious or simply intuitive, these children through their photos have succeeded in chronicling of toils of the margins. The artistic energy of course was generated by their empathy. Their work blur the line that divides children’s photography from that of the professional adult photography.
