Za’atari Refugee Camp, the world’s second largest refugee camp, is home to nearly 50,000 Syrian refugee children.

For three months, a group of Syrian girls (ages 14-18) from Za’atari participated in a media workshop to gain artistic and technical training in photography and video, with encouragement to reflect on and voice their own stories and those of their surrounding community. With cameras, microphones and pens in hand, the girls set out to document their everyday lives – how it looks, feels and sounds from the ground, at the heart of their world.

For the girls, the experience of narrating their worlds through film and photography transformed the foreign landscape of the refugee camp into new terrain for exploration, self-discovery and self-expression. Taking photos and video became a way for them to articulate the sometimes unspeakable, a lens through which to look at and experience the world around them in new ways, and a tool with which they were able to investigate and start to ask themselves and the world around them critical questions.