“I didn’t know anything about photography,” Bingwa says. “I just got some kids together and told them they could do something that was right where they lived. They could take pictures, sell the pictures. I told them it was a way of controlling their destiny.”

Bingwa’s idea was to get the kids on the Venice Dream Team to travel and take photographs, develop and evaluate them—and then sell them to finance more trips. He found professional photographers who taught the kids and joined them on trips. The photographers were teaching one kid at a time. “I saw that the kids weren’t helping each other,” Bingwa says. “Now on our trips we have non-photographers with us. And the kids always seem aware of each other.” (Photographers still volunteer—but to work with the kids at the Team’s basement studio/darkroom in Venice.)

The World in a Viewfinder