September 2, 2006
The Coleman Center for Arts and Culture is pleased to announce the opening of New Outlooks: Images from the Coleman Center’s Youth Photography Class. This exhibition features the work of eleven students who spent one and half months of the summer documenting their point of view through photography. The students’ work is now on display at the Coleman Center gallery from September 2 to October 14, and combined images are also featured on billboards throughout Sumter County. An opening reception will be held on First Saturday, September 2, from 6-8 pm.
The Coleman Center’s class, taught by Directors Shana Berger and Nathan Purath, used point and shoot cameras, color film, and digital printing, and focused on composition and self-expression as the main tenants of the class. Activities included an introduction to the history of photography, building a camera obscura to understand fundamental photographic principles, self-portrait workshops, and ongoing group discussions and critiques of the student’s shooting assignments.
The final result of the class, an exhibition at the Coleman Center gallery and public art billboards that are displayed in York and Livingston, are the combined efforts of the Coleman Center’s Educational Program and the Public Artworks Program, which are working to revitalize the community through creativity.
Coleman Center Director Shana Berger says, “It is always a delight to work with children as artists. They see things differently than the rest of us do, and they have the ability to simplify things by looking at them very directly. Our main act is to create a space for their vision within the community, allowing the kids to partake in a new relationship with an aspect of mainstream culture by forming the message themselves.”
The show documents these new outlooks. The technical imperfections of the point and shoot cameras and the photo-mat prints, which were scanned into the computer, resized, and reprinted digitally, have a kind of immediacy. They capture the quickness or impulsiveness of the students’ gaze, fresh and new to the kind of looking that photography entails. And yet combined with the sometimes out of focus and grainy quality of the images, they seem at the same time nostalgic or reminiscent of childhood for those of us who find ourselves looking back on it.
Almost all of the students wanted to share images from their own lives. They re-photographed family portraits and home decorations, and the television was a favorite among many students. Over the course of the class they developed their own iconography that monumentalized the characters of their childhood in images of Sponge Bob, Ice Cube, Spiderman, and family pets.
A special fundraiser will be held during the exhibition in which the students run a portrait studio in the gallery, taking pictures of attendees for $30.00. The photos will be taken with a digital camera, and subjects will receive a printed photo with a digital file. All proceeds from the class will fund future youth educational initiatives at the Coleman Center.
This class was made possible by funding from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Black Belt Community Foundation, the Alabama Power Foundation, and the generous contributions of our individual supporters. For more information please contact the Coleman Center for Arts and Culture at (205) 392-2005, info@colemanarts.org.