Future Smithies?

January 20 - April 30, 2010
SMITH COLLEGE
Alumnae House, 33 Elm Street Northampton, MA 01063

People who look at my work often ask, "How do you get kids to do that?" The truth is, I don't "do" anything. I listen and follow their cues. My goal is to capture their experience of childhood, not impose adult fantasies of childhood onto them. Parents often have deeply emotional responses to my work because they do not just see a likeness of their child but something deeper and more real.

In my years of working with children, both while earning my Master's degree from Lewis and Clark College in Child and Family Counseling and photographing children for seven years in Portland, Oregon, I have learned that childhood is many things. Foremost, childhood is vulnerable, it is fragile, and it is fleeting. Children, however, have particular tools they bring to this reality. They are smart, they dream, they ask questions, they are silly, quirky, and sometimes quiet. These are the places, the moments, where I find the resiliance, the strength, and the dignity of childhood.

The girls I photographed for "Future Smithies?" are not different than any other children that I have encountered in my work except that they are all connected to Smith College by their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers or their great-grandmothers. I invite you to engage with these photographs and help me investigate what this connection means. This project is a work in progress. At this point it represents girls who live in the West, and despite my desire to photograph girls of color, this part of the project is undone.