How We Work

Ethical collaboration is the foundation

of Coral Kids

Coral Kids is built slowly, through relationships, permissions, shared learning, and careful attention to how images are made, held, edited, and shared. The project works with children, families, community mentors, Grow Aitutaki, Aitutaki Coral Restoration, Mike Lee, and local partners in Aitutaki to develop a documentary and visual archive shaped by trust and ongoing conversation.

For Coral Kids, ethical collaboration means paying attention to the whole life of an image. Who holds the camera? Who is photographed? Who feels comfortable being seen? Who gets to decide which images are kept, edited, printed, published, or held back? These questions guide the project as much as the filming, photography, workshops, and fieldwork.

Photography is often a group undertaking shaped by power, race, and wealth. Access to cameras, confidence in public space, the ability to be seen safely, and the right to describe one’s own world are unevenly distributed. Coral Kids responds to this by treating photography as a shared practice. Children are invited to use cameras, make images, review photographs, ask questions, and contribute to the growing archive from their own point of view.

The camera workshops begin with physical experience. Children hold the camera, move with it, test it in the water, photograph friends, family, landscape, animals, objects, and moments that catch their attention. These first images may be blurry, accidental, tilted, or unexpected. They are part of the learning. They show what happens when a child begins to use a camera as a tool for looking, describing, and participating in how a place is remembered.

Consent is treated as an ongoing practice. A camera changes the space around it. People notice it. They react to it. The person holding the camera has to decide where to stand, how close to get, when to photograph, and when to step back. These small decisions open conversations about comfort, attention, permission, and care. In Coral Kids, learning photography includes learning how to notice the person in front of the camera as much as the image itself.

The project also recognises that children’s images carry responsibility. Their photographs are part of a public-facing project, a documentary process, and a community archive. Images are selected and shared with care, especially when children, families, and community members are identifiable. Public use of images is guided by permission, context, and respect for the people represented.

Raquel Trejo’s role in Coral Kids is to support documentary development, photography, visual language education, children’s image-making, archive development, editing, training, and documentation. Grow Aitutaki, Aitutaki Coral Restoration, Mike Lee, and local partners guide the local community context, reef care context, swimming and lagoon knowledge, and Aitutaki-based relationships that make the project possible.

The archive is developing over time. It includes children’s photographs, field notes, Raquel’s images, documentary footage, workshop records, voice notes, and updates from each trip. It is a living record of the process: how the children learn to use cameras, how they see the lagoon, how they describe their own experiences, and how the project grows with the people involved.

Ethical collaboration also means accepting that the project will keep changing. The documentary story, the workshops, and the archive are shaped through fieldwork, feedback, community relationships, and the children’s own ways of seeing. Coral Kids is a long-form project, and its process matters as much as its final outcomes.

At its centre, Coral Kids asks a simple question:

Who gets to produce the visual archive of a place?

This question guides the documentary, the photography workshops, the field notes, and the archive. It asks how children and community partners can participate in the way Aitutaki is photographed, remembered, and shared with wider audiences. It also asks what responsibilities come with making those images public.

Coral Kids is guided by care, patience, authorship, consent, and shared responsibility. The work begins with cameras, but it continues through listening, editing, returning, printing, discussing, and building an archive that can hold more than one point of view.