ArtVenture Freedom to Create Prize

Finding light in darkness and courage in truth.

ArtVenture, in association with ARTICLE 19, is proud to launch the inaugural Freedom to Create Prize. This international prize will recognise artists who use their talents to promote human rights, including the freedom of expression, empathy, equality and understanding

In all societies, the development of the arts has been a sign of culture and light. Yet not all governments provide citizens with the ‘

freedom to create’ needed to foster innovation, commerce and prosperity. Some governments harass and impoverish their citizens, steal resources, stifle entrepreneurship and undermine human ingenuity and hope. In these societies, art can play an important role in giving a voice to those who are denied opportunity and resources.

ArtVenture Freedom to Create Prize will consist of three categories. The main prize will be open to individuals or artistic groups in all creative fields including the visual and performance arts, music, crafts, design and literature. The winner of this award will receive US$ 50,000.

ArtVenture Freedom to Create Youth Prize will be open to artists who are under the age of 18 with the winner receiving US$ 25,000 scholarship and advocacy prize. The final category, the ArtVenture Freedom to Create Imprisoned Artist Prize, will focus on artists who are currently imprisoned for their artwork. The winner will receive US$ 25,000 towards supporting their family, paying legal costs and supporting advocacy efforts.

This is not an art prize. It will not simply judge the skill of the artist but recognise how the artist has used their work in speaking out in defence of human rights and freedom of expression. The inaugural prize will be a unique and significant award and will be judged by a panel of eminent artists, and human rights experts and philanthropists.

For More info CLICK HERE

Connect with IPE on Facebook

Looking for more ways to connect to the Institute? You can now join us on Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, to track all IPE news, updates and events. Follow the link below, or CLICK HERE to visit IPE’s Facebook page.
Link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Los-Angeles-CA/Institute-For-Photographic-Empowerment/14986231023

Homeless capture their street lives on camera

Published 8:47 AM EDT, April 5, 2008. A photography exhibition by and about the homeless — spawned by a good, hot breakfast? Only a creative type could make that leap.

And last weekend, the leap culminated in the opening in Huntington of an exhibit of nearly two dozen black-and-white images taken by a group of homeless men.

The seeds for the exhibit, which runs through April at Temple Beth El and will be shown at other Long Island congregations, were sown in November 2006, when photographer Rob Goldman found the only slot open on a volunteer sign-up sheet at his temple, for a project with the Huntington Interfaith Homeless Initiative, involved getting up in the dark to make breakfast once a week.

The group’s program, which was organized with the Family Service League of Huntington in 2005, shelters Huntington’s homeless during cold weather, providing hot meals and a warm place to sleep at eight local congregations, says Carol Werblin, who chairs Temple Beth El’s social action committee and is also heavily active in the initiative.

Although he cooked for the men each week, Goldman, 45, says it took almost until the end of the program that first season he was involved, in March 2007, for relationships to start to build. That was partly because most of the homeless served by the group are from Central America and Mexico and don’t speak much English.

“I really wanted to find a way to not be a voyeur, not a casual observer…to find out what it’s like to not have what I have,” Goldman says.

He was inspired by photographer Zana Briski’s 2004 film, “Born Into Brothels,” which won a best documentary Oscar and concerns children living in Calcutta’s red-light district who used cameras to chronicle their lives. Goldman enlisted Manhattan firms Flatiron Color and Lexington Labs to process film and produce exhibition prints at low cost. The homeless-assistance group Friends of the Students for 60,000 and Temple Beth El’s Social Action Committee helped buy the 80 disposable cameras the men used.

The exhibit captures the photographers’ lives on the community’s streets and in the woods where they sometimes sleep.

“They take amazing pride in their work,” Goldman says, and they got excited when he displayed their photos for them, saying, “‘That’s mine! That’s mine!’”

At the exhibit’s opening on March 29, the photographers were brought in to see their handiwork. Their pride was evident as they examined their framed photos on the temple’s stark white walls and grinned as they shook Goldman’s hand and embraced him.

Asked what he hopes the exhibit will accomplish, Goldman acknowledges the lack of any simple solutions to the men’s homelessness. “I don’t propose to have any answers; that’s the beauty of art,” he says. But perhaps the show, he adds, will “force people to look at their own questions and see if the solution can begin.”

To see the video of the project, click here.

Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

Urban Photo Album, Ankara, Turkey

Type of Project: Multilateral Exchange Project
Theme: art, cultural heritage, sports, environment, social work, leisure time activities, volunteering..

Most of us live in very big and crowded cities. And as the time passes the places we live and our city have been changing. We want to share this life together for 6 days and take photos from all different ways of life in Ankara. So, we will visit many places and take photos with our digital cameras.

We believe in the power of the arts as a medium for social transformation and that the re-connection to create processes within social, educational, governmental and non-governmental structures. This exchange program aims to give Turkish and European organisations the opportunity to enhance exchange, partnership and co-operation. By discussing the experiences of the participants from various countries we hope to create chances to establish face-to-face contacts and discover new opportunities for further and long lasting relationships between different countries.

Photography, especially digital photography, is increasingly used as a tool for bringing new social processes, development in all sections of our global society. We would like to bring together and catalyse the young people in the concept of photography and co-operate and share experiences and projects through collaboration in the area of art and bring new intercultural learning in the concept of photography. This exchange aims at bringing together youth leaders and experts to discuss art issues and real-life problems and to develop communication and negotiation skills

The activities to be done will concern about the knowledge, skills and motivation of the participants. We believe that giving chance young people to show their desires and skills with other young people by sharing the same atmosphere and showing them that they can create new things even in a short period of time this project will encourage them to be more active in their real life.
There will be 3 activities on 3 different topics. These are:

-the advantages and the disadvantages of living in a big city
-what can we do as active citizens to have better life in our cities
-the importance of photography. (and also discuss the importance digital photography)

For Original Post CLICK HERE

 

 

Photography as a Tool for Understanding Youth

This United States-based study examines the use of youth photography as a research method by comparing the results of a community photography project to standardised questionnaire results evaluating youth/community relationship. As stated in the research, “[r]ecently, interest in photography as a tool for research and action has gained new energy under the rubric of photovoice.”

The authors found evidence that participation in photovoice projects strengthens youth relationships to their communities and attemped to compare that evidence to evidence from other research tools.

From the abstract:

“The purpose of this study was to compare photographic and questionnaire-based approaches to examining youths’ relationships with their communities. Thirty youth living in an urban neighborhood developed a collection of photographs depicting connections to their community. Youth also completed the Neighborhood Youth Inventory, the Collective Efficacy scale, and the Sense of Community Index, and were interviewed. A method of assigning ratings to the youths’

photographs that combined their own ratings with independent ratings by social scientists resulted in a measure that correlated significantly with questionnaire-based measures. This article discusses and illustrates the results through a case study, and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each method as a tool for understanding neighborhood connections.”

The youth perspective on the differences between a questionnaire format and a photographic research approach to measurement of their relationship to their communities suggest that they found the questionnaires more comprehensive, but lacking in certain categories, e.g., transportation, nature, playgrounds, and small businesses. They criticised this method as constraining. They criticised the photography method because some photos that they felt were critical did no develop well and other photos lacked key people in the community because of the release forms needed for photographing subjects (which was reported to engender suspicion among adults toward youth in the project). The youth also feared that the photos would be misinterpreted or misunderstood.

The researchers found that their attempt to code the youth photos to compare scores with the questionnaires they administered did not yield strong correlations. However, “[w]hen researchers weighted youth ratings of their photographs based on the photograph’

s relevance to social connectedness, photography scores correlated significantly with total scores on both the Sense of Community Index and the Collective Efficacy measure.”

In conclusion, the authors commented that, beyond the correlation with existing methods, youth photography can both provide researchers with insight “into the unseen perspectives of community insiders”, and it also has the potential to spur action as well as research by altering the photographer’s relationship with the surroundings.

For Original Post CLICK HERE

Kashmir Seasons

Creative Photography as a Psycho-social Therapy Project in Kashmir, Pakistan, with Child Survivors of the October 8, 2005, Earthquake

A project of Diakonie Emergency Aid (DEA), a member of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) InternationalObjective of the project

Diakonie Emergency Aid (DEA) is carrying out a psycho-social project involving creative photography with 80 children between the ages of 12 and 18 at several middle schools in villages located in Kashmir in Pakistan. With guidance from workshop sessions and interactive discussions, the children have been photographing daily life in their surroundings, paying particular attention to the changing seasons and the recovery of life after the October 8, 2005, earthquake that struck border areas of Pakistan and India. With the single-use cameras they are provided, the children are also given notebooks to record related thoughts in a diary

Prior to the start of the project, the children’s teachers were introduced to the psycho-social aspects and impacts of the project. Together with their help, the children who are particiating in the project were selected.
Within special tutorials and workshop discussions, the photographs of the children are short-listed, analyzed, discussed and edited together with each and every student who participates in the project, thus involving the children in a creative self-expression exercise through photography and writing. By capturing a sense of time and place, this educational project will re-establish a sense of belonging, and, therefore, an improvement in the mental health of the participants.

At the end of the project, the children will be encouraged to choose their 12 best photos of the four seasons in all the villages, from which a calendar will be put together as the final product of the project. The calendars will be distributed to all the children involved in the project as well as in all the schools in the Salmiah and Chikar villages of Kashmir. Thus, the children themselves will have created their own calendar for 2008.

Carrying out the project

In June 2006, 70 cameras were distributed to 60 children. The ages of the children varied from 12 to 16. Boys and girls took part, with emphasis on an equal distribution of cameras to both groups.

The aim of the project was to enable and facilitate a group of children affected by the earthquake to create a photo story that would represent the place they live in, what they lived through, and how they are recovering. With this purpose, and working under the theme of the natural environment, the project set about to produce a calendar with photos that accurately described the change of seasons, paralleling the changes in the children’s lives. The change in seasons was found to be a natural theme in which the children can easily depict the changes in their lives after the earthquake. Also this would help them understand the fragility of nature, and therefore the reasons for the earthquake, as well as providing the added benefit of not blaming themselves and their communities for the disaster they lived through, a frame of mind that is common in the culture and belief system of the Kashmiris.
Part I: Summer
Children’s Pakistan - Summer Photo Essay

The first part of the project involved photographing the summer season. It was decided to work in two different settlements for the project - Chikar town and Jabar Jandali village.

Chikar is a more “urban” area, and Jabar Jandali is by far the most remote and “rural” of the surrounding villages in the area of DEA’s operation.
Other similar photos taken by children in other parts of the world hit by disasters (Bam, Iran, tsunami areas in Sri Lanka, and refugee camps in the Sahara Desert) were shown to the children. They were asked to discuss the similarity of these disasters as well as the similarity of their photos, the emotions they are portraying, and the messages they are giving through these photos. These workshops were an opportunity to provoke discussion and thought about the entire experience of photography while at the same time creating a dialog among all participants and world cultures.

Out of 1,680 photographs taken by the boys and girls, 45 were chosen to represent the first part of the project.
For the first anniversary of the earthquake, an exhibition was held at Chikar Fatima Foundation School on October 9, 2006, with outdoor shows held near DEA’s Chikar camp and in all of the 16 villages of Salmiah union council.

Thousands of children from the town and surrounding villages came to the shows. The Chikar exhibition was organized entirely by the children of Chikar Fatima Foundation School, who also put on various colourful performances.

The activities of the day included drama performances, singing, dancing, prayers for those who died in the earthquake, and speeches by students, teachers, and community members.

The outcome of the first part of the project showed the expressiveness, empowerment, pride, self-confidence, and responsibility of the children.

The selection of these 45 images of the summer season formed a basis of the next phase of the project autumn.

Part II: Autumn Children’s Pakistan - Autumn Photo Essay

For the second phase of the project, the schools in the village of Pano Pindi were included to give more students a chance to express themselves through photography.

Similar to the first phase of the project, the children were given one week to shoot their photos during the second week of October.
After a wide edit was made, the photos were brought back to the children to discuss with them the reasons behind the chosen photographs. Workshop sessions on further editing and discussions on photo contents and composition were held. A second set of cameras was given to the children to shoot with over the Ramadan Eid holidays. Having seen their efforts and results in the first round of photos, the children were encouraged to take photos in a different and more creative and expressive way. Approximately half the participants showed clear improvement in the second set of photos shot, signalling that they were positively affected and had taken note of what was said in the workshops.
Of all the 2,160 photos shot from the 90 cameras distributed, a final selection of 50 images was made.

After this, the chosen images were handed back to participants, and they were asked to write captions for them. Some of the captions had personality, revealing a lot more of the participant than just a plain description of the image.

Even though the first snow fell in the village of Jabar Jandali on November 17, 2006, the autumn session was closed with the consensus that the third part of the project would begin the first week of December.

Impacts of the project

The main purpose of this project is to empower individual children through the act of taking photos. This also enhances a thought process - in essence: “We are given a task, so how do we accomplish it?” Because the children are working toward a goal and a product, there is a sense of responsibility that accompanies the project and the act of taking photos.
This also encourages self-confidence and enhances the social skills of the children through participatory and interactive workshops and the act of sharing their creative work with others.

Eventually, it gives the participants satisfaction to have their photos shared and appreciated; even more so for those whose photos were displayed in the exhibition. The accompanying satisfaction is encouragement.

The participants add their individuality to the project through creative photos and writings about the seasons. In the open discussions periodically held throughout the project, children have asked about the fragility of their natural surroundings, the earthquake and even about global warming. After the final discussion, a group of children from Chikar actively picked up litter from the school yard because they had all determined that their natural environment was precious.

For original post CLICK HERE

Photo-voice project shows homelessness through the eyes of those who live it

June 26, 2008
Photo-voice project shows homelessness through the eyes of those who live it

A University of South Carolina psychology researcher and three graduate students, using photographs taken by 16 of Columbia’s homeless citizens, have created a display that depicts homeless life.

Thirty-five photographs from the photo-voice project and description are on display in the community gallery at the Columbia Museum of Art through Aug. 3. Together, they convey feelings about being homeless, illustrate shelters used to survive, describe ways to make money and detail the many legal challenges that homeless people face. Visitors also can take an audio tour, which includes interviews with the homeless talking about their experiences.

The exhibit, “While I Breathe I Hope (Dum Spiro Spero): Columbia’s Homeless Share Their Stories Through Words and Images,” is a collaboration between the university team (assistant professor Dr. Brett Kloos and graduate students David Asiamah, Greg Townley and Dorian Lamis) and the Midlands Interfaith Homeless Action Council, the Central Carolina Community Foundation and the museum.

“It struck us that the voices of the homeless were missing in the larger discussion about homelessness in the community,” said Kloos. “There are many good people working on homelessness issues in Columbia. We felt that one contribution we could make was to talk with people who are homeless and help find a way for their voices to be heard to a greater extent.”

Kloos and his students started the photo-voice project last winter by talking with homeless individuals who were taking refuge at Columbia’s winter emergency shelter on Huger Street.

There, they interviewed people and asked for volunteers who would be interested in taking photos of their daily experiences. They distributed 78 disposable cameras, along with instructions on techniques, safety and ethics. Thirty-six of the cameras were returned, and the team was able to discuss the photos and their meaning with 28 of the participants.

Some of the photographers said the camera gave them a sense of identity.

“Most people are not proud of being homeless, but taking the pictures made me feel strong and proud,” said Lesa, one of the photographers. “It felt good taking pictures.”

Townley believes visitors to the exhibit will be struck by the humanity of the individuals who are featured in the photos and in captions.

“It’s embarrassing to me,” said an anonymous person from the shelter speaking of homelessness. “It’s kinda - I feel degraded, and it’s embarrassing to my family and friends. Took a lot of my morale, my pride away and stuff like that. It don’t feel good; it don’t feel good at all.”

Asiamah hopes common stereotypes of the homeless will be dashed. Kloos says the general public will be surprised to learn that many homeless individuals work and that most are not chronic substance abusers or mentally ill.

Kloos says they chose South Carolina’s state motto for the title of the project because it conveys the spirit of the homeless and the challenges for the community to address homelessness.

The motto’s first part, Dum Spiro Spero or “While I Breathe I Hope,” captured the resilience and hope of the people who shared their experiences. The second part, Animis Opi Busque Paratu or “Prepared in Mind and Resources,” captured the community’s struggle to understand homelessness and to better address it.

“Taking photographs for this project made me realize that being homeless is not only our problem, but it’s a public problem,” said Beverly, another photographer for the project. “It’s a lot of things that need to be done to help the community and society.”

Kloos specializes in community psychology and has studied homelessness for more than 12 years. The photo-voice project was an outreach effort of a graduate course on community intervention. Townley is from Rock Mount, N.C., and David Asiamah and Dorian Lamis are from Little Rock, Ark., and Atlanta, Ga, respectively.

For more information on the exhibit and Columbia Museum of Art hours and admission costs, visit the Web site: www.columbiamuseum.org.

For Original Post CLICK HERE

Youth Photography as an Alternative Measure of Social Capital

The Park Hill Photovoice Project examined youth photography as an alternative measure of social capital.

Traditional measures generally rely on researcher-developed questionnaires that assess subjective perceptions of neighborhood qualities (e.g., sense of community), or counts of “objective” neighborhood features (e.g., number of liquor stores, percent homeowners). Our goal was to complement these approaches with a third approach in which community insiders, in this case urban youth, create a visual community portrait based on their lived experiences. Photographic narratives avoid several problems inherent in surveys. They do not use pre-determined response categories that might be insensitive to marginalized people’s worldviews, they do not require knowledge of formal or majority group language, and they allow people to shape their own messages and convey them in ways they deem meaningful.

For this project, 30 youth from 12 to 18 years of age (14 African American, 11 White, 3 Hispanic, 1 Asian American) attended four weekly workshops in which they thought about social capital in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver, learned photographic techniques, and completed existing questionnaires. Between workshops, youth photographed their neighborhoods and compiled the best of their work into community portraits, each consisting of 5 to 10 photos. Youth rated the scene depicted in each of their photos twice-how negative or positive it was, and how typical of Park Hill. Across seven months, the reliability of these scores was .44

A team of researchers derived nine coding categories from youth’s community portraits that corresponded to conceptions of social capital in the research literature and also captured the content of the photos. Photographs were coded and youth ratings were used to derive scores in each category. A principal component factor analysis identified one component on which all nine scores loaded. Two scores reflecting qualities of space loaded most highly (.85). The first was whether the space depicted was nurtured (e.g., tended garden), neglected (e.g., unkempt yard), or disrespected (e.g., graffiti on garage door). The second was whether the space was welcoming (e.g., an inviting path) versus excluding (e.g., snarling fenced dogs). Organized Activities, Formal Gathering Space, and Non-personal Relationships also loaded highly (>.6).

Next we examined correlations between photographic scores and scores on five established measures of social capital. In preliminary analyses we had assessed the intercorrelations of the 20 scales that comprise these five measures. Ten were significantly intercorrelated (average intercorrelation=.47) and were used to establish construct validity for the photographic scores. Five photographic scores correlated with the 10 criterion variables and they were the same five scores that loaded highly on the principal component of the factor analysis. Nurtured/Neglected/Disrespected Space emerged as the strongest score, correlating significantly with 9 of the 10 criterion variables, with an average correlation of .46 (comparable to the average intercorrelation among criterion variables). Organized Activities (e.g., street fairs, tennis lessons) correlated most consistently with objective counts of neighborhood features. Scores reflecting social relations and informal activities were not highly correlated with criterion variables.

Photographic narratives can effectively tap dimensions of social capital also tapped by existing measures. In addition, photography can yield new insights by representing the voices of marginalized groups. These representations can inform both measurement and intervention. In this project, youth’s community portraits also appeared in a community exhibition and were used as a springboard for youth-led discussions with community stakeholders. In the tradition of action research, we sought to strengthen youth social capital as we studied it.

Jennifer Kofkin Rudkin, Ph.D.

For Original Post CLICK HERE

Notes from the Classroom: Visual Storytelling in a Composition Course

It all started with an unlikely idea: integrating participant-produced documentaries into the upper-division general education writing course we teach at USC. Given that students are already so steeped in visual culture, one could legitimately question why we would waste classroom time teaching film basics rather than the more critical skills of written argument and analysis. Furthermore, how would the difficult work of forming partnerships with community organizations facilitate the goals of the course, to “place marked emphasis on the public, professional, and academic aspects of writing within specific disciplines and career field….to hone the composition skills that [students] first acquired in the lower-division course”? In other words, do these types of documentaries and the work they entail have pedagogical uses in the composition classroom?

Our idea first took shape from our desire to integrate service-learning into our writing classes. Placing writing in a real-world context teaches students that writing matters, and allows them to see the value of writing rather than viewing their assignments as empty exercises designed to please the arbitrary or subjective demands of their professor. We imagined partnering our students with local community groups to develop research projects that would emphasize the connections between academic rhetoric and “real world” issues. In our vision, the writing that they would do for this class would help them see their larger place in social systems, as part of the conversation that makes up our democracy, emphasizing in particular the way that writing functions as a form of social action.

What we discovered was that using community-based documentaries as a course requirement enabled us to move beyond the versions of service learning most often used in the composition classroom, typically structured around either a “writing for” or “writing about” approach, either helping community organizations with students’ expertise as writers and thinkers or using the community as subjects for our students’ research. We wanted to do something different, something that would engage the community as partners rather than clients or subjects, each partner bringing something to learn and something to teach. We wanted to challenge rather than confirm the implicit hierarchy that values only the expertise, knowledge and discourse produced by the university. Partnering students with community groups-high schools, nonprofits, juvenile detention facilities-and asking them to collaborate on five-minute documentaries positioned our students as facilitators rather than as experts, engaged in the mutual project of using stories to experience the world through unfamiliar perspectives.

We were fortunate to find a supportive partner in the IPE at the very beginning of the course; not only did we draw encouragement and inspiration from the model of participant-produced documentaries originated within the IPE, but Pablo Toledo also provided crucial guidance for our students as they began these collaborations. If the IPE’s model provided us with a more equal platform for “town” and “gown,” these type of projects also challenged our students to think through their initial assumptions about power, privilege, and inequity. Another potential problem for service-learning courses is that they can confirm rather than dislodge a simplistic understanding of social relations. In Bruce Hertzberg’s influential essay “Community Service and Critical Teaching” he acknowledges the way that service learning can turn into “charity” if it does not actively foster “an understanding of the social forces that produce and sustain poverty, illiteracy, discrimination and injustice.”

To address this problem, we structured the class to first investigate the institutional and systemic factors that curtail individual choices and opportunities. Working with their community partners, students identified issues pertinent to the community-issues such as disparities in public education, safety at inner-city schools, racism, the achievement gap, and the juvenile justice system-and researched these issues using both community and academic voices as experts. This in-depth exploration of the social, political, ideological and economic forces gave them a backdrop for the visual stories they would tell in their documentaries, stories which would in turn make these more abstract forces real.

In the end, our course, “Writing in the Community,” was more difficult and more rewarding than we could ever have expected, for both teachers and students. Finding community partners was relatively easy, but matching partners with students’ busy schedules was a far greater hurdle. Managing these partners’ expectations-making sure they were on board with our model of collaboration rather than tutoring-was also a challenge. By far the greatest difficulty came in getting permission to film from parents and other authorities, a difficulty that proved insurmountable for two groups partnered with a juvenile justice facility. Although we had initially received assurances that we could easily get a judge’s permission to film the minors at that facility, the site administrators put up so many obstacles that we had to abandon the idea of bringing in cameras. Without the mutual project of filmmaking, our students lapsed into the more familiar, hierarchal models of service, but the restriction also brought into question a justice system that deprives its inmates of their ability to construct their own visual narratives. Absent “subjects” for their documentaries, our students made self-reflexive documentaries that explicitly exposed their own biases, the difficulties they experienced navigating these cross-cultural relationships.

Other partnerships similarly exposed some of the assumptions our students brought to these projects. At one site, our students were surprised by the high percentage of seniors planning to attend college, a jolt to their vision of inner-city students as low achieving dropouts. By digging more into the issue for their research projects, they discovered that inequities persisted even within higher education: these seniors were mostly headed for local community colleges, not the pricier colleges still reserved for the more privileged. And their teachers, too, worried about their ability to graduate from college once admitted, given the funding gaps that threaten to restore what Jonathon Kozol terms “apartheid schooling.” Their documentary highlighted these inequities by contrasting Beverly Hills High School with 32nd Street School, an inner-city magnet school right across from USC, using words and images from students at 32nd Street to poignantly articulate the costs of such injustice.

As our students adjusted to working with people whose life experiences were very different from their own, so our community partners tried to figure out exactly what we were doing, their enthusiasm about working with USC students tempered by wariness about our commitment to a mutually beneficial learning experience. Bringing cameras into the classrooms helped facilitate relationships in the “contact zone,” Mary-Louise Pratt’s term for “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” By giving our community partners access to digital cameras borrowed from the university, we redistributed resources (if only temporarily) and gave them control over their own stories. The shared project of recognizing the way the many decisions involved in the shooting process-choices about camera angles, lighting, focus, etc. etc-change the message of the story gave all of the participants an inside-out view of how visual texts work to convey meaning. And, most importantly, together the students recognized the power of such texts to bring to public attention neglected or marginalized perspectives.

Uploading these videos to YouTube ensured that they would reach a wide audience and, through the public comment section, opened up conversations about the issues they raised. Still, institutional inequities made it difficult to fully realize the collaborations we had originally imagined. Without access to the editing equipment and training our students had available-resources made possible for our students through the generous support of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy-our community partners were unable to participate in the final shaping of their stories. We hope to rectify this problem with the help of a grant we received from the Center for Excellence in Teaching to purchase a computer and editing program we’ll be able to take into the community, once again using the resources of the university to redress some of these structural inequities.

Our students described this course as a transformative experience, one of the most meaningful courses they’ve taken at USC. One student, Erica Andrews wrote: “I feel like this is the class college students talk about that changed their life in some way. This class gave me the privilege to work with and help kids from the local community and that felt so great. Making that documentary helped me feel like I was making a different, even if it was a small one.” And Simone Andrews wrote: “This has been one of the best classes that I have taken so far at USC. It has been a transforming experience and I hope to use all that I’ve learned in future endeavors.” The response from our community partners has been equally positive. In fact, one of the students from 32nd Street School was so inspired by the documentary that she wrote and directed another documentary, this one a further investigation into the intra and intergroup racism explored in the first project. We look forward to continuing and expanding these partnerships next year the next time we teach the course.

To see some of the videos from the course, search YouTube for “Disparity in Public Education,” “In the Rough,” “Skin Deep,” “Experimental Learning at West Adams,” “Safety First!,” and “Design and Education at West Adams.”

Stephanie Bower

John and Stephanie are happy that they survived the first semester teaching this course together on speaking terms. Stephanie has a Ph.D in English and has taught at UCLA and Claremont McKenna College. John has a Ph.D in Education and a Master’s in Professional Writing. Both are currently Senior Lecturers in the Writing Program at USC.

THROUGH THEIR EYES GALLERY

THROUGH THEIR EYES is a camera project facilitated by Meet Justice, directed by Daniel Homrich, and Essential 2 Life, directed by Vince Hungate, non-profit organizations based in Atlanta. This project focuses on 12 of Atlanta’s at risk youth who have made a commitment to bring change to the community. Through professional photography and video instruction, these youth have learned how to use their creativity as tools to influence society, and provided them a creative outlet to bring to light their reality as seen “Through Their Eyes”. Our desire for this project stems from the collective voice of the students screaming, “You don’t know what it’s like!” By empowering these students to tell their story, we are creating a catalyst for action.

Through bi-weekly forums, the Meet Justice team along with visiting professional photographers and videographers have instructed the youth in photography skills along with teaching them the journalistic side of documenting life around them. These youth have spoken up and are looking for a voice. Through Their Eyes provided for them not only a creative outlet to speak, but also the ability to cause change by telling the stories they feel the media neglects to tell.

The Through Their Eyes camera project lasted for 60 days and included 6 forums where photography instruction along with story telling concepts were taught. The youth were split into two groups, half focused on still photography while the other half directed their attention toward video. Each forum the students were paired with either a professional photographer or videographer who discussed their footage with them, and helped them develop the story that they are looking to tell.

Join us on December 9th from 5pm-9pm to experience the raw stories through powerful photography and video as seen through the eyes Atlanta’s inner city youth journalist.

The time has come for the voiceless to be heard, and life to be seen as it truly exist. No longer will the excuse of ‘you don’t know what it’s like’ exist. You are now responsible.

For original post CLICK HERE

Next Page »