Collaboration: East Bali Poverty Project

One big subject within the book is the focus on raising awareness on the poverty within Bali and specifically how this has an impact on the Balinese women. The idea is to capture the women in their environments and pick out objects that may hold metaphorical meaning about the women's lives and more importantly the malnourishment that they may face. Capturing images of the children will also be a key element to this message that is being developed because the malnourishment of the women will directly effect the children and their development. Kristina is travelling to Bali to work as part of the 'East Bali Poverty Project' and also to shoot the photos needed for the publication. 

The 'East Bali Poverty Project' is a non-profit organisation established in 1998 by a British resident of Bali after an appeal for help by an isolated 7,200Ha mountain village, forgotten by time and progress. 
Without:
- water
- sanitation
- roads
- schools
- health facilities
- electricity
The village was approaching 100% illiteracy and the malnutrition and iodine deficiency disorders were endemic - iodine being the essential  nutrient for healthy child births, brain and body development. 

The charities main focus is 'helping people to help themselves' and sustain the development into the future, long term rather than short term.

Kristina had been part of this project a year ago, teaching art and english to the children in the village. Due to the charity knowing her, she was able to go back out for a short period of time to help but also use the time to take a lot of photos that will work for the concept of the photogrpahy project, but also help to promote help for the Balinese village. 

In our meeting we discussed the content that will need to be shot when out in Bali so that there is a variety of focuses we can take when developing the book content and the exact message that we want to portray. 

Possible content:
- portraits of women in their village
- portraits with a white back drop so that the assumptions can be taken away based on the environment, but thn a further out shot showing the backdrop being placed outside of the studio, revealing more about the women
- metaphorical objects in the village that will represent the poverty in a more subjective manner
- photos of the village children
- dispoable cameras given to the children to photograph themselves and their environment

Whilst Kristina is a away we will keep in contact, sending design ideas from my behalf and then the content from her behalf. This will allow for a strong idea on how the final outcome will be as we will not have a massive amount of time to pull it all together when she returns. 

I will need to continue researching into existing publications of a similar nature in order to see where the artists have developed the concept for the design from. The layout of the content will need to be carefully considered so that the message can be portrayed in the most powerful way possible.