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May Issue 2005
Caldwell County Arts Council in Lenoir, NC, Offer Photography Exhibition on Young Pregnancies
The Youngest Parents, a traveling exhibition of documentary photographs from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will open on May 9, 2005, at the Caldwell County Arts Council's Art-in-Healing Gallery in Lenoir, NC. The exhibition will run through June 30, 2005.
The Youngest Parents exhibition consists of twenty-five black-and-white photographs taken from 1986 to the present day, including follow-up photographs of the young parents, now adults, and their children, now teens and young adults themselves. The exhibit also includes text panels that allow us to read young mothers' courageously candid reflections.
Despite recent trends suggesting a reduction in the rates of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing, the United States continues to have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the industrialized world. This exhibition provides an additional means for thinking about this important reality and fosters dialogue about family relationships, sex education, and the day-to-day difficulties of the youngest parents.
John Moses, a professor of photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and a practicing pediatrician, spent eleven years documenting teenage parents in North Carolina counties. Jocelyn Lee, a photography professor at Princeton University, spent six years in parts of Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Nova Scotia, living and working with young mothers. Friendships of support and caring developed between the photographers and the teens, and the trust resulting from these relationships deepens the character and meaning of their work.
"In a sense I became a doctor making a kind of home visit, though my diagnostic tools were exchanged for a camera," says Moses. "No longer the confident, all-knowing doctor, I became open to new ways of thinking about the issue of adolescent pregnancy.
"As a result of my visits as a photographer, I have gained new understandings of adolescents that I believe have made me a better doctor. Having gone out to meet with them in their world, I have been provided a richer, more accurate context in which to see them, and I hope, better understand their experience."
An interactive documentary workshop will be held in conjunction with The Youngest Parents exhibition on Saturday, May 21, from 10am until noon at the Caldwell County Memorial Hospital, in Lenoir. The documentary workshop will be led by Dr. John Moses.
Moses regularly teaches undergraduate
documentary photography courses at the Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University, while also practicing and teaching
pediatrics at Duke University. Using his own documentary work
with teenage parents as an example, Moses will teach participants
the basics of how to begin a documentary project. He will also
discuss ethical issues involved in photographing and interviewing,
and discuss the historical and social issues of documentary work.
Liz Lindsey, exhibitions coordinator at the Center for Documentary
Studies, will present information about photography, oral history
resources available on the Center's Web site, and utilizing arts
and humanities resources in North Carolina.
The workshop is free and open to the public. It will be accessible to beginners as well as useful for skilled photographers, oral historians, and those interested in the issues surrounding adolescent pregnancy.
This exhibition was organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The exhibition and related workshop are part of the traveling exhibitions program of the Center for Documentary Studies. Funding for this project was provided by the North Carolina Humanities Council, a state-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the North Carolina Arts Council, with funding from the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
For further information check
our NC Institutional Gallery listings, contact the Caldwell County
Arts Council at 828/754-2486 or at (www.caldwellarts.com) and
the Center for Documentary Studies at (http://cds.aas.duke.edu).
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