A Note From Home is a long-term, participatory project using photography, portraiture, oral history, writing and archives to explore the complexity of family and personal narratives in collaboration with young people who have experience in the foster care system or with homelessness.
The images above consist of portraits I shot, and many of the images below were created by the participants or are from family archives. Initially funded by the Center for Documentary Studies' Lewis Hine Fellowship, each young person involved in the project produced their own body of work, exploring an aspect of their personal narrative in search of new 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, and the everyday things people carry with them.
Portraits on view 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. 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.
Portraits and collaborative work on view at Powerplant Gallery.
