Since 1990, PhotoSensitive has taken on 12 projects. How do you decide on your next project?

Our projects always start with a discussion about the subject and the need for it. We meet over coffee or beer and we spend hours talking about different aspects.

Our idea is to bring awareness to social issues and help different organizations and people in need. We want to educate the public about social problems.

Our first project was It’s In Their Eyes for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Through our images, we were able to raise awareness. The public responded by flooding the Daily Bread Food Bank with donations.

We’ve done 12 projects and three more are on the way.

How do you organize your projects? How do you decide who shoots what?

In a newspaper or magazine the photographer is given an assignment, brings the photographs back, and doesn’t have any influence or say in the decision on which photographs will be used.

PhotoSensitive photographers donate their time and talent to each project using individual freedom to shoot their own visions. Collectively, we set out to create a powerful and meaningful message.

The success of our group is that there is no one person who does assigning and editing. Once we choose a theme, each photographer creates his own assignment, shoots the way he wants and edits his photographs.

We tend to spend more time with our subjects. For example, for The Hospital for Sick Children project, each of us dedicated about three months to get to know the people and get the shots we were looking for.

At the end, we select the best of what we have for the show.

Why just black and white?

By working in black and white the photographers force viewers to focus on the image rather than on the photo. PhotoSensitive believes that still photographs, especially in black and white, have a way of touching people in a unique way.

This project is about water. That’s a big, broad subject. Tell us how you came to that.

After working in Zambia on AIDS, I could not get over the fact that people in many African countries have to walk five kilometres or more to bring home clean water.

In Canada we use water so freely, not realizing that it’s the most precious thing we have on the planet.

Aside from that, when I thought about it, I realized that not so many years ago nobody would think twice about drinking water directly from one of many lakes in our parks, such as Algonquin Park. Today, it’s a different story.
 
We do not have a water crisis in Canada. Not yet. But let’s think about our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Will they have clean water to drink and to swim in?

Basically, we are very spoiled, and use much more water per person than people do in the rest of the world.

Some of your subjects, such as water, have political overtones. Is this something that comes up in your discussions?

Some of our projects include a strong social statement. That is part of what we do.

For example, when the government announced an initiative in the year 2000 that it would work toward making child poverty disappear in Canada, PhotoSensitive decided to join Campaign 2000. In 2001 we did the project A National Disgrace showing powerful images of the effects of children living below the poverty line in one of the richest countries in the world.

Since your Life of Water project has gone public, have you had any notable feedback from individuals, corporations or governments?

We have had a very warm response from the Ministry of Natural Resources. They plan to use some of the images in their 2006 environmental plan.

Do you think your photographs help create change?

It is difficult to say whether our photography has changed anything after such a short time. But already I see awareness and education in progress. We get requests from teachers asking us to come to their schools and speak about the projects and how photography can help affect change.

Great things can happen from chance conversations. On an afternoon in 1990, former Toronto Star photographer Andrew Stawicki and former graphics editor Peter Robertson were chatting about photography. Mostly, they were concerned about photojournalism failing to provide the kind of documentary work made famous by Life magazine. They wondered if a team of photographers could be formed to produce such work.

By the following week, Andrew had recruited a diverse group of 15 professional photographers and PhotoSensitive was founded. Each
photographer would bring his or her vision to a subject; the sum of these visions would provide a compelling social comment.

Life of Water is their twelfth project. Three more have already been planned.
 
www.photosensitive.com