The Community Story Lab: How Does a Community Dream?
This month, the participants of Community Story Lab -- Venice Arts' year-long media arts project pairing adult community members with professional artists -- explored dreams through the lens of a camera. As each photographer showed their work, they discussed their interpretation of the prompt, and what dreams meant to them. From "chasing dreams" to "time as a dream" to "dream homes," the responses were as diverse as the photographs that resulted from this particular shoot.
For this post, lead artist and award-winning photographer Sara Terry put together a select of photographs from the participants, drawing attention to the commonalities of our seemingly disparate approaches to dreaming.
Here are her edits and musings on the photographic dreams of the participants:
This edit of pictures is from the workshop prompt for "dreams." The assignment I gave the students was really just a series of questions to help them start thinking about, and seeing/photographing, dreams as they relate to community. Does a community dream? How does it express those dreams -- where are they to be found? How does a collective group of people express its hopes and desires? How do dreams become reality?
The night we reviewed the work, I was struck by the many ways the photographers were searching for metaphor, and the ways they were each trying to explore the questions I'd posed to them. I spent a few hours later going through each portfolio, choosing images that I thought were the most evocative. From that selection, I looked at all the images together and let the images tell me how they wanted to be sequenced, how one image related to another.
Now that we have spent four or five months together in the workshop, I think one of our great strengths has become the way we speak a visual language together. There wasn't really a definitive essay on dreams in anyone's portfolio from that day, including my own, but when we brought our individual visual voices together, I think we had a lot to say about how a community dreams. --Sara Terry
Great news! We are accepting new participants into The Storyteller's Voice component of the Community Story Lab! Find out more information about how to join the year-long intensive project here.
The Community Story Lab is supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.