By Geoffrey Vendeville for Toronto Star – Wed Mar 23 2016: Teenage paparazzi equipped with digital cameras have had the run of the Aga Khan Museum of Islamic art and civilization for the last four days, snapping pictures of ornate ceramics, rugs and anything else in the collections and backrooms that catches their eye.
The 20 shutterbugs, between 13 and 16 years old, are students in a photography workshop for underprivileged youth hosted by Fredric Roberts, a former Wall Street executive who ended his career in mergers and financing to travel the world and take photos.
“As the 70s became the 80s, and the 80s became the 90s, my taste for greed and corruption and the sort of thing that Michael Douglas made in the movie (Wall Street) were much less palatable to me,” he said in an interview at the museum, Day 3 of the weeklong, free course.
Roberts founded the investment banking firm, F.M. Roberts and Company, in Los Angeles in 1980. In 1993, he was chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Association of Securities Dealers, which owned and operated the NASDAQ stock market, according to his website.
He learned to use a camera on a six-week trip to Thailand, China and Tibet in 1986. But it wasn’t until he retired 14 years later that he rediscovered photography. At 58, he took a photo workshop in Santa Fe and returned to Southeast Asia. Pictures of his travels, from India to Cambodia and China, became the basis for his first book, Humanitas.
Source: Toronto Star
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