A Note From Home is a long-term, participatory project and forthcoming photo book using photography, portraiture, oral history, writing and archives to explore the complexity of family and personal narratives in collaboration with youth who have experience in the foster care system or with homelessness. Initially funded by the Center for Documentary Studies' Lewis Hine Fellowship, the work considers the body as a vessel: what passes through us, the geographies we pass through and the way history is etched on gestures, faces and landscapes. Each young person involved in the project produced their own body of work, exploring an aspect of their personal narrative in search of new, sometimes radical, meanings of home and family. The work explores rites of passage, the strength required to constantly rebuild home, landscape as a form of protection, imagined childhood maps, the unacknowledged work of people like grandmothers and mentors, and the everyday things people carry with them.
Portraits at Black Rock Center for the Arts
As the project facilitator and artist, I made a series of portraits in a participatory manner, working to shape a single image out of a life story. Stemming from oral histories I conducted, I suggested themes, locations and gestures and we collaborated in the planning and photographic process. The portrait series offers images that reflect the participants’ own sense of identity as well as a suspended period between childhood and adulthood.
As a collective we are also developing a photobook, paying tribute to the act of processing one’s story, finding the fragments and harsh moments to arrive at strength. We believe that in making a permanent, bound book, this project can resonate with young people and the broader community because the mere existence of a product like this — one made by marginalized youth — printed and bound is meaningful and rare. This particular community rarely gets to see themselves as a community at all -- one with overlapping goals and dreams.
Iterations of the project have been exhibited at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, NJ, the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS, and the Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD. The work has also afforded us the chance to complete an arts residency at The Sanctuary For Independent Media and Skidmore College in upstate New York. We have received additional support from the Pollination Project and the School of Social Work at Rutgers University to continue photographing and traveling around New Jersey.
The images above consist of portraits I shot, collaborative images and images from family archives.
Below are images of us working on the project, planning an exhibit and going on a spring break arts residency.
