Monthly Musings: Focusing on the Voices of Youth
August 12th was International Youth Day, which the United Nations began in 1999 as “an opportunity to celebrate and mainstream young peoples’ voices, actions and initiatives, as well as their meaningful, universal and equitable engagement.” In recent years it has been energizing to see climate change and anti-racist activism led by young people throughout the world, as they demand much-needed systemic change. In honor of International Youth Day, my focus for this month’s blog post is exhibitions from the Blue Sky archive by Wendy Ewald and Rania Matar, as both artists have prioritized the creative voices and self-determination of young people in their work.
Poster for Wendy Ewald’s Blue Sky exhibition in February 1990.
Blue Sky has exhibited projects by Wendy Ewald twice: first in 1990, and more recently in 2017. Ewald’s 1990 show featured the series Portraits and Dreams, which the artist began in 1976 while teaching elementary school children black-and-white film photography in rural Appalachia. She encouraged her students to photograph everything and everyone around them—including themselves—and to explore their dreams and fantasies through image making. Blue Sky’s online archive of the show is sparse, but the artist’s website contains quite a few images and written reflections the students created during their time with Ewald. She continued teaching in the region until 1981, although she kept in touch with some of her students after leaving. In a more recent iteration of the project that was part of the 2014 People’s Biennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, she collaborated with former student Denise Dixon, who became a wedding and maternity photographer, to present an exhibition of Portraits and Dreams that also included photographs by Dixon.
Orange, 2013, taken by Razi, 6th grader at Convent of Nazareth School, Haifa
At Home, 2013, taken by Amal at the Azazme B School, Bedouin Village of, Wadi Al-Naam, Negev Desert
In 2017, Blue Sky exhibited images from Ewald’s project This Is Where I Live. From 2010–2013 the artist worked with a total of fourteen different communities in Israel and the West Bank, providing point-and-shoot digital cameras and mentoring participants as they visually documented their lives. The show included nearly 400 images by shopkeepers in the Jerusalem market, traveler children in the Old City, elderly Palestinian women in East Jerusalem, high-tech workers in Tel Aviv, and students in military academies and elementary schools.
In many of the images by young photographers, there is a sense of wonder and close looking, like in the images above by Razi and Amal, where the formal attention to composition and color is especially striking. Many of the young participants in this project also focused on aspects of daily life that reflected the ongoing conflicts in the region. Below is an image by Waleed, who photographed a resident of a nearby Jewish settlement from the vantage point of Samoud Challenge Center in Hebron, a volunteer-run center that serves Palestinian children affected by nearby settlements. In another image by Hannah at Tzahali Military Academy, a group of young women crowds into a small bathroom while going through the mundane tasks of getting ready for the day (or preparing for bed).
Settlers, 2013, taken by Waleed at Samoud Challenge Center, H2, Hebron
Crowded Trailer, 2013, taken by Hanna at Tzahali Military Academy, Mesout Yitzhak Kibbutz, near Ashkelon
am particularly interested in projects like Ewald’s because they merge the artistic genres of social practice* and photography. The process of sharing information—a collaboration of sorts between Ewald and her students—became as important as the photographs that resulted from this exchange. Ewald shared her photographic knowledge so that others, young people and adults alike, could develop their own artistic voices, and in turn, share their stories using new tools.
Rania Matar, Mimi, Winchester, Massachusetts, 2011
“I couldn’t tell you if it is hard being a teenager because I don’t have much experience not being a teenager. I think life is hard for a lot of people, regardless of their age or gender.”
Another series that focuses on young people is Rania Matar’s A Girl and Her Room, which Blue Sky exhibited in 2012. What started out as a way for the artist to engage with her own daughters and their friends by photographing them soon became a much larger project involving young women living in Massachusetts and multiple countries in the Middle East, parts of the world that Matar calls home. By photographing her subjects in their bedrooms—spaces within a family home where a child may carve out a sense of self and autonomy—Matar introduces us to each teenager from this intimate perspective: “Being with these young women in the privacy of their worlds gave me a unique peek into their private lives and their real selves. They sensed that I was not judging them and became active parts of the project. The beauty and strength, the aspirations and dreams of these young women are deeply moving. I have tried to be the invisible mirror of those qualities.” Although the artist instigated the project, it became a collaboration, with each girl’s space functioning as the outward expression of her inner self that Matar then photographed.
Like Ewald’s work with children in Appalachia, Matar asked each subject to write about herself, and many of these responses function as captions for the images in the book of the series. In many cultures, the thoughts and desires of teenage girls can be dismissed as frivolous or unimportant. However, through her close attention to these intimate spaces where young women’s dreams begin to take shape, Matar insists that they be seen and heard.
Rania Matar, Elham, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut, Lebanon, 2009
“My parents can’t send me to school. I study along to graduate high school. I was engaged but was not in love. I wanted to get married so my parents wouldn’t have to keep worrying about me.”
Rania Matar, Stephanie, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010
“Parents in Lebanon get too involved, all the time! My dad always worries about me and boys and doesn’t like it if I wear short skirts. I LOVE Justin Bieber and my dream is to meet him!”
*If you are interested in learning about some other Portland-based social practice artists who use photography in their work, check out the “Photography and Social Practice” panel discussion Blue Sky hosted during the This is Where I Live exhibition in June 2017.
“Monthly Musings” is written by Exhibitions Director Zemie Barr and highlights work from past and present Blue Sky exhibitions that share a common theme. Thanks for reading.