This annotation was created by Juan Pablo Pinto Mendoza. 

Popular Education in Revolutionary Times: Reflecting on Nicaragua's Popular Education Program in the 1980s

2. Personal Association

The photograph calls to mind my experience working with a media collective in Brazil, Midia Ninja. I started working with the collective in the summer of 2016 during a trip to Rio. At first, my collaboration was more informal, accompanying collective members as they documented important social and political events and sharing my images with them. But, as I continued to work with the group I became more immersed in their collaborative process of creating, editing, and publishing media content. This collaborative process was new to me as previously the extent that I would collaborate was to coordinate and delegate responsibilities for different aspects of a project. However with Midia Ninja the collaboration process went much deeper: similarly to the image above we would work together to capture a shot that communicated a joint vision, we would edit images as a team including editing each others pictures and video footage, and the final results were published under the banner of Midia Ninja with so much input from different team members that the idea of one sole author of the final product lost meaning. Further, the collective operated under the model of a “free university”, where collective members worked together to help each other strengthen their skills in different areas of media production. For example, photographers helped writers strengthen their photography skills, writers helped videographers improve their interviewing skills, etc. The idea was that over time each person would become a much more well-rounded media artist. Similarly to what is shown in the image above, this created a very physically and socially close learning and working environment where members were able to learn from each other’s strengths as well as life experiences, to not only recognize but also value each other’s differences and perspectives when approaching each project.

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