This new generation is growing up in a digital age, creating possibilities never imagined
Introduction
before. They are not only the consumers of content, but also creators. The photos and interviews in this book, all from students, are a stunning example of the power of young people as producers of new knowledge in today’s digital world. Young people have lots to say. . . it’s time for us to listen.
H
ow do you make the camera snap? ” asked 14-year-old Prakash, a student at Government High School-Cotton Pet in Bangalore. “I have never
known a camera before,” he told us, with his teacher translating into English from
Naresh Gupta
Ann Lewnes
Senior Vice President (PCPBU) &
Senior Vice President
Managing Director, Adobe India
Corporate Marketing
Kannada, the city’s most common language. Over the next several days, Prakash and his classmates took close to 2,000 photographs with the digital cameras we gave them, capturing daily life in their neighborhood and in the city’s largest open market and park. Just minutes after learning how to “snap,” the students were producing photos that took our breath away. An 87-year-old great-grandmother doing her family’s laundry in the small courtyard of their school. Pushcart workers straining in front of the Krishna Rajendra market. A vegetable seller taking an afternoon nap. A finely dressed family picnicking in Cubbon Park. These new young photographers in Bangalore were part of a larger documentary photo project, which What Kids Can Do (WKCD) carried out in 2006 and 2007 with student teams in Noida and New Delhi, generously supported by Adobe Systems Incorporated and its international initiative, Adobe Youth Voices. Students at Noida Public Senior Secondary School spent the year gathering photographs and interviews that showed the contrasts globalization now produces at every turn in India: between old and new, Eastern and Western, rich and poor, traditional and
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india in a time of globalization
introduction
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