Millions of images are produced daily and almost every person on the planet knows what a selfie is. Photography has become a daily practice in the digitized world, feeding social media and family chats worldwide. The images communicate - here am I, this is me, I am alive, I am here. And we use them to communicate with each other. Or, from the inner to the outer world. And we can reassure ourselves by using photography.

Here is where participatory photography comes in. It uses photography as a tool to reflect the participants' lifeworld. Through images they capture certain feelings, moments, situations, behavior or social structures. They can show parts of their life and choose what and how much of it they want to reveal.

For this exhibition, photographer Mali Lazell teamed up with Verein Coolture and Druzi Zürich to facilitate a 6-day participatory photography workshop with 20 Ukrainian teenagers during a summer camp in Zürich, Switzerland. They explored the topic of self-portraiture |selfie| автопортрет from various perspectives, using photography as the key tool. Every participant was equipped with a digital camera and photographed different tasks throughout the workshop. The teenagers wrote texts accompanying the images. This method was used to really communicate what the intention of the photograph is, what the photographer wants us to know and see.

The body of work shown in this exhibition is the result of an inclusive process where each participant could choose how much he or she wanted to be involved, or how much he or she wanted to share with the outer world. There was no goal to be reached or product to be created. The process itself was the main experience. So the outcome and the further course of the process was uncertain - one could call it in progress. It was also the first time that Mali Lazell, who in this case was functioning as the facilitator and not within her profession as a photographer, executed a workshop with this many participants. So for her too it is a work in progress - learning step by step how to implement her knowledge and experience about participatory photography.