Photo Start

08/20/2026

One of the cameras in these photos was donated. It could have stayed in a drawer. Instead, it is being used by a student to learn how to make an image, look at the result, and try again.

That process leads to much more than a photograph. Students get comfortable with cameras, computers, files, and editing software. They talk about their choices, learn from feedback, and often help the next student along.

On World Photography Day, we are grateful for the people who make that possible. If you would like to join them, you can give money to support the classes or donate useful equipment that deserves a new life.

Give:
https://photostart.org/donate/

Donate equipment:
https://photostart.org/donate-equipment/

08/20/2026

Amazing students doing amazing things!

07/14/2026

Student work from El Alto, Bolivia, seen as a sequence of place, structure, direction, landscape, and atmosphere.

Photography asks us to slow down long enough to notice how a place holds together. These images reflect that practice: observing closely, framing with care, and finding meaning in ordinary details.

Photo Start celebrates the attention and visual language emerging through this work.

07/06/2026

Today would have been Eric Spencer Richenstein's birthday.

We're thinking of him with this photo: young Eric in the kitchen, smiling, years before he became a chef and someone who loved to cook. Looking at it now, it feels like foreshadowing. The warmth was already there.

Eric's Circle of Light was created in his memory, and it has become one of the ways Photo Start carries that warmth forward.

When the world changed, Eric's Circle of Light helped us keep showing up for students. Our focus on hybrid and digital classes allowed young people to keep learning, creating, and building confidence even when in-person programs were disrupted or out of reach.

That work helped Photo Start persist. It helped us grow. It helped us reach countless students through photography, mentorship, life skills, and creative education.

Now we are stepping into the next chapter.

As students grow up in an AI generation, Photo Start is expanding the tools we place in their hands. Photography remains at the heart of what we do, but the future also includes digital learning, creative technology, and AI-supported education that helps young people imagine what is possible.

Eric loved to cook. He understood the joy of making something with care and sharing it with others. That same spirit lives in this work: gather people in, give them tools, help them create, and let the light travel farther.

Today, on Eric's birthday, we honor his life by carrying his light forward.

Help carry Eric's light forward.

06/29/2026

El Alto is not just the backdrop for this course. It is part of the students’ visual language.

Mountains, roads, weather, open ground, city edges, and everyday details all become material for learning composition and storytelling. Through these images, students are practicing how to make place visible — not as scenery, but as something lived in and observed.

06/26/2026

Noemi G.’s students in El Alto are learning to look closely at the world around them — not only at dramatic views, but at the people, roads, buildings, weather, and details that shape daily life.

This carousel brings together several different ways of seeing place: a person against the scale of the landscape, color and structure in the built environment, a road opening toward the sky, and a small sign of community life with the mountains beyond it.

Photography education starts with that kind of attention: noticing what is worth framing, choosing where to stand, and building the confidence to tell a story through an image.

06/24/2026

Black-and-white photography asks students to pay attention differently. Without color, the photograph has to carry itself through light, contrast, shape, weather, gesture, and mood.

This set from Noemi G.’s students in El Alto brings together several ways of seeing in black and white: a dramatic sky, a figure against open space, a person moving through the landscape, and a road drawing the eye forward.

The result is quieter and more graphic — less about bright color, more about form, atmosphere, and the feeling of a place.

06/23/2026

When roadblocks and protests brought parts of El Alto to a standstill, the students in our Bolivia cohort continued looking for ways to practice. 📸

Throughout May and June, despite transport disruptions and lockdowns, instructor Noemi Daniela Gonzales Cabrera helped the group find ways to stay connected. From shifting to virtual learning to organizing an intentional outdoor shoot near the city’s cable cars on May 20, these students used photography to maintain their creative practice during uncertain times.

For students like Norka, this course has provided “a new language to express what I see.” For others, it is a way to find focus when the world feels unpredictable. We are proud of this cohort’s continued practice and their commitment to mastering visual storytelling.

Join us in sending a message of support to our El Alto community. 💙

06/19/2026

From El Alto, the city and mountains become part of the classroom.

Noemi G.’s Photo Start students are continuing their photography projects through a difficult period of roadblocks, uncertainty, and disrupted transportation around La Paz.

As the cohort moves toward the final weeks of the course, we’re sharing views from their recent practice as encouragement — and as a reminder that creative work can continue even when circumstances are difficult.

Photo by a student in Noemi G.’s class, El Alto, Bolivia.

03/09/2026