Youth choose Activism as an Extra-Curricular

My Photo scholarship 2011 entry

South Africa | Monday, November 7, 2011 | 5 photos

Since I was small my Mother has always reminded me that life is about balance. My personal pendulum has always been swinging between the fields of art and activism. As I am almost halfway through my final year at Global College, and constantly thinking about the realities of adulthood; I am attempting to center that pendulum in the heart of where art and activism meld into one. I have spent the majority of my undergraduate years as a Global College student uncovering the possibilities for photography as both an art form and the much needed tool of an activist. It is where these two fields meet that I find unsurpassable beauty. From documenting the lives of impoverished Nicaraguan immigrants in La Carpio Costa Rica, to teaching an analogue photography class to high school students in Durban, South Africa with the intention to create a better understand of the other by promoting a deeper understanding of the self, I have spent my college years investigating the diversity and depth of relations that I can build between me, my camera, its subjects. The photos that I am submitting to this contest are a fraction of a greater whole that I did on a group of student activists at my former Seattle high school, Ingraham. It is a project that comes out of believing that there is much in our world which needs changing but that none of the changing will be complete if we do not recognize the changers. Fundamentally, the foundation of this project brings me back to my Mother and her emphasis on balance; you must be able to see the good before you can alleviate all the bad. Dorothea Lange said "The camera is an instrument which teaches people how to see without a camera". I hope to never stop learning new ways to see our world.