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First Photo Here, a project exclusively for Instagram, focusses on new arrivals to Canada and the photos they share with friends and family back home. Linking people across time and place, this project represents a wide array of new experiences and first impressions.

Curated by Joella Cabalu, First Photo Here is for anyone who has moved somewhere new and knows the thrill and trepidation that goes along with it. By turning personal stories into collective ones, we’re all invited to share in the richness of these moments and the connections they forge.

First Photo Here, a project exclusively for Instagram, presents a collection of captured moments that link people across time and place. While focusing on new arrivals to Canada and the photos they share with friends and family back home, First Photo Here represents a wide array of new experiences and first impressions. It’s about turning a personal story into a collective one, and the richness we derive and the connections we forge from these shared moments.

Composed of photographs gathered from people across the country, this project tells a story of arrival and possibilities. It’s a chance to see Canada through new eyes, at the most basic level. Anyone who has moved somewhere new can relate to the thrill and trepidation that come with uprooting your life for the unknown, and we’ve all had the desire to share that experience with those we’ve left behind. Photography is one of the most common methods we use to do that.

First Photo Here is curated by Joella Cabalu, an award-winning Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker. Cabalu is ethnically Filipino, was born in the US and raised in Brunei, and came to Canada at age six.

“Photographs and first-person narrative are powerful ways to transmit stories. But they also act as a time machine, conveying the immediate feelings of the moment, and reflecting on time passed since then,” Cabalu says. “I was attracted to the broad appeal and accessibility of First Photo Here—that participants and people viewing the project needn’t be Artists with a capital A to submit a photograph or understand the collection of stories.”

First Photo Here is produced by the NFB, with curation by Joella Cabalu and creative direction by Kindred & Scout.

Two-liner
First Photo Here, a project exclusively for Instagram, presents a collection of captured moments that link people across time and place. While focusing on new arrivals to Canada and the photos they share with friends and family back home, it represents a wide array of new experiences and first impressions.

One-liner
First Photo Here, exclusively for Instagram, focusses on new arrivals to Canada and the first photos they share with family and friends back home.