THE HOME PROJECTS: COLORADO
The Home Project is grounded in the belief that young people, especially those whose economic realities, cultures, races or genders lay outside the mainstream, are too often immersed in media images and words that devalue their own identities and the beauty and diversity of their local cultures and home spaces. By encouraging youth to express, in images and words, what they love about their home “place”, the project hopes to affirm the connections these young people possess to their local land, cultures and communities and to nurture their own capacities to shape these communities in positive ways.
The goal of each project was to teach photography as a tool to give voice to the connections young people felt to their home places. In versions of the project that took place over a longer time span children were also asked to document the challenges they saw in their communities and the ways they hoped these might change. The word ‘community’ implies both people and place: our social and ecological homes. The stories we tell about those places, both in our private conversations and the public discourses, need words from our hearts and imaginations. When we fail to give voice to these words from our hearts, we lose the ability to articulate the value of, and remember, the intangibles of what we love.
The first project was funded by the Colorado Council on the Arts (now Colorado Creative Industries) and took place in Silverton, Colorado. Over the course of two months in 2002, I worked with junior high students in the town’s sole school, teaching them the basics of photography and documentary work, hand processing all their film and work prints each week and returning to share and discuss each week’s images with thme. At the time, Silverton was facing serious economic challenges; the families of nearly a third of that year’s class were moving away once school ended to find more certain work and incomes in different towns. In 2003, I designed and implemented smaller versions of the project, working with individual families in Cortez, Mancos and Ridgway as well as with a group of young people in an after-school program in Telluride.