I’m serving as volunteer photodocumentarian for a youth development project in the community in which I worked before retiring. The project brings Emory University students together with middle and high school age youth from this extremely diverse low-income community around storytelling—collecting stories, composing stories, presenting stories; stories of the participating youth themselves—many are refugees and have dramatic stories to tell; stories of significant adults in the community; and through the latter stories of the community.
The director of the project has decided he wants decent, interesting portraits of the youth for an assignment he wants to give them. He has a model, a wonderful book of simple, interesting, and beautiful portraits of high school youth done by a professional photographer, Dawoud Bey. <http://www.dawoudbey.net/index.php/photographs/class-pictures/> I did the best I could without notice last week. I spent the hour and a half of the session getting in the faces of individual students. Gradually the students I got comfortable with what I was doing. I have not finished processing the images yet, but I sense that there are going to be very few that I would consider adequate for the purpose. I think I’m going to have to do something different this week, which is the last opportunity to get the portraits before they are needed. I’m thinking of taking a tripod, setting it up somewhere it the room in which the project meets, and pulling students out one-by-one. That is going to be challenging enough, but I have no idea what to do to get interesting photos, photos that are at least somewhat revealing of the character of the subjects, once I have the kids in front of the camera. I am frankly intimidated by the director’s model, the Dawoud Bey book. No way am I going to be able to do anything lie what he has done, but something like what he has done is what is wanted/needed. Suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA eew...@bellsouth.net "Our world is a human world." - Hilary Putnam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
