Global Learning

Learning in Lansing

This was a project at the Global Institute of Lansing (GIL), they provide educational services for adults who are refugees and help them earn their high school diplomas. This shoot was for the Capital Region Community Foundation (CRCF), an organization that provides grants to a really wide ranging set of non-profits in the area. They wanted to showcase a grant they had given to GIL.

When CRCF approached me for this project, I immediately thought about Dawoud Bey’s Classroom Pictures. Several years before this shoot, I attended a lecture by Dawoud Bey about his portraits of American teenagers. His photo series and exhibition was accompanied by texts from each of these students. It as so powerful to see what younger students were thinking in these formative years of their upbringing. If you haven’t seen his work, I urge you to look at them.

In the pre-production stages of this project for CRCF, I couldn’t get Dawoud Bey’s work out of my head.