You don't need much to act. Sometimes a shoe box, aluminium lid and some imagination can be far enough. Then you only need  to start up. 

Lots of children in Europe have very limited access to interesting activities helping them to develop their personal potential.

The idea of Akademia Pstryk was conceived among art professionals who'd wanted to help vulnerable children living in The Centre for Homeless Mother and Children MARKOT in Warsaw (Poland). Pinhole photography seemed to be the best tool. The children were encouraged to prepare hand-made cameras of shoe boxes and use them to make photos of the world surrounding them. Results of the project surprised its initiators. Photos made by young people were shown at the exhibition in Galeria Mokotow, the shopping centre in Warsaw. This way very first project, Markotne Otworki, came into being.

Exploration of the new possibilities laying in art have challenged the people willing to help others. That's how the idea of Akademia Pstryk, an art group using pinhole photography as a mean of social change, promoting social empowerment and giving possibility to act, came into being. All people working with Akademia Pstryk are proactive, have lots of fantasy and are willing to pick up the gauntlet and achieve goals.

With  Akademia Pstryk works:

Marta Kotlarska:

She used to travel without money, hitchhiking, around previous Soviet Union states and the Middle East.  Lots of times creativeness, stress resistance and ability to facilitate contacts, saved her from death. Also that night, somewhere in eastern Turkey, when nine fatigues dressed men pointed a fire-arm at her.  

She had been dreaming of making photos since she was six. Having envied her friends' popular those days, cheap, plastic cameras called Smiena, she organized for herself, yummy nowadays, LOMO camera, with numbers not clouds drawn as symbols  on its lenses. But no one ever have developed  any of the films made by her. After taking her A- levels she travelled to Moscow with recycled Canon, and brought from this trip photos of drug addicted new Russians. The photography has became justification of  her untypical need to visit the places where no one other would ever go. She got involved in the documentary and reportage photography.

Afterwards she discovered the magic of pinhole photography, its simplicity and egalitarianism. The magic of picture not showing the real world any more but taking beyond imagination. The picture where  dreamtime meets reality in a way possible to capture.

Pinhole photography helps her to love life as it is.

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