Emmy-Award Winning Photojournalist Helps Protégés Spotlight Community Issues
Mario Tama, Emmy Award winning staff photographer for Getty Images, recently mentored protégé photographers through Feast, a new online community from iStockphoto. Feast’s 2011 theme "Create a Better World,” focuses on building social conscience through documentary style photography.
Through Feast world-renowned artists like Tama are inspiring other artists to focus on generating attention for specific issues through photography, including those that are well known, untold or under told -- in this case, the plight of the Welsh family farm.
Mario's task to his protégés: Photograph an essay on a subject in your community that you feel deserves and calls for attention — and helps demonstrate the power of photography to highlight important issues, even instigate change.
One of Tama’s protégés, Andrei Nacu created a project that revealed the personal story of a struggling farmer from Tyla Farm in Wales and the pride of the work. You can see more on Mario's mentorship of Andrei and Andrei's final gallery of haunting images on Feast.
Andrei said as he started his project: "Factory farming contributes to the decline in farm numbers. Small farms cannot keep up with the changing economy. It is just too hard for most. It is mostly the larger farms and agriculture business that remain. Like all businesses, the larger the operation, the cheaper is the production, so agriculture became industrialized.
"For every new huge factory farm, about 10 small farms shut down not being able to compete. Furthermore, the supermarket chains, which control the majority of the UK food market, only want to deal with big farmers who can deliver exactly what the supermarket wants, when it wants it. The decline of small farms in the UK is also being accelerated by the sale of country land to city people who want old houses in the countryside and do not want the bother of maintaining the land."
