Over the weekend, the Aperture Foundation opened an exhibition of work produced by students in Aperture On Sight, its visual literacy program that involved over 100 students from seven NYC schools. The program spans twenty collaborative classes that guide students in analyzing and interpreting images, creating their own meaningful photographs, and self publishing photo books. It includes emerging image-makers from all over the city: fifth graders in the Lower East Side’s Grand St. Settlement after school programs as well as high school sophomores at the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School.
Aperture On Sight: Teaching Visual Literacy through Photography doesn’t simply provide a window into the lives of young New Yorkers, but shows us how these students choose to represent their city and their stories with a knowledge of photography’s power. We meet the faces of Harlem’s Storefront Academy, watch parallel trains snake through Brooklyn, and catch a moment of artful calm in the eternal chaos that is the Essex – Delancey intersection.
“It will be the visually literate among us who will be the most effective communicators in the digital age,” the exhibition’s release reads, and isn’t it true. The New York Times estimates we’ll take over a trillion digital photographs this year, and god knows how many of them will be snapped from selfie sticks smack in the middle of Times Square. Good news for us, though: our city’s youth is learning how to create and communicate through unique, lasting images.
‘Aperture On Sight: Teaching Visual Literacy through Photography’ runs through August 11, more information here.
Credits
Text Emily Manning