This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
About My Students
Lily has a strong passion for photography. She is a senior and is planning to go to college to pursue editorial portraiture photography in college. I have had Lily for five classes over three years and she has excelled in each of them. She is diligent in learning more about her craft in and out of the classroom. She has been exploring new ideas for portrait photography.
The students I teach attend a dedicated visual and performing arts high school in Georgia where they are required to select a major and continue on that path, whether it is in Visual Arts, Communication Arts, Dance, Theater, or Music, for the duration of their high school career.
Along with the challenging arts classes, students are taking advanced academic coursework, as well as staying involved in a number of extracurricular activities. These students are highly motivated and extremely talented, and strive to be the best that they can be.
In all walks of life you have to interact with people. In many cases you will not always know the people you will interact with. Some those initial actions can turn into jobs, life long friends or even life long partners. The interactions may be significant or inconsequential and taking the chance to have those interactions is critical to meeting new people. This project will make students move out of their comfort zone. They will have to interact with strangers and make comfortable enough to allow them to be photographed. The ability to interact with people you do not know can be used as a life long skill. Once the students have photographed all 50 strangers we will use the computers and the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud to compile a large photographic work of the portraits. These portraits will be retouched and cropped to 5"x5" and displayed in a grid.
In Their Own Words
I am trying to capture the personality and character of 50 people whom I have never met, even though I am unaware of what exactly that may be. I am also attempting to establish relationships, even if just a slight beginning on one, with the people that I am interacting with while taking these photos. I want to establish a level of comfortability between and within myself and my subjects.
I will remain committed to the quality and truth of my work, a continue to my full effort into capturing people the way they are. I will also create a positive impact on those that I take photos of, through pleasant interaction and complimentary words. This is a possible thing to do, and I am lucky to have a project that guides me in doing that.
This project is important because it forces us to step out of our comfort zones and our personal social spheres. It pushes us to new boundaries and allows us to interact with people that we may have never interacted with otherwise. It challenges us to risk not having the “safety” of our normal environments and to see people as who they are, rather than simply strangers walking by.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Taylor and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
