Communities can look vastly different through the eyes of young people. The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia invites the young people of Athens to provide their unique perspective in its Student Photography Contest: Athens through Our Eyes. This contest centers around the theme “What does living in Athens in 2022 look like to you?” and encourages young people to capture their experience and identity as a young Athenian.
A panel of museum curators and staff will judge submissions. Winning photographs will be on display in the museum’s education center from November 12 to November 30, 2022. A reception on November 12 from 10 a.m. to noon, will open the photo display as part of UGA’s Spotlight on the Arts Family Day event.
The Student Photography Contest accompanies “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund,”(opens in new tab) an exhibition of southern photography ranging from the 1950s to the present. The Do Good Fund is a Columbus-based public charity that focuses on building a collection of post-World War II southern photography. In celebration of the Do Good Fund’s 10th anniversary, the museum is featuring 125 photographs from the fund organized around six core themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship.
“My hope is that the student photography contest will connect the broad themes of the Do Good Fund exhibition directly to the Athens community,” said curator of education Callan Steinmann, “We’re inviting Clarke County School District [CCSD] students to create photographs that document and share their lived experience as a teen living in Athens, just as so many of the photographers in the Do Good show have captured southern life and culture in their images. The Do Good Fund encourages community-based programs that complement exhibitions of their collection, and I think that this project, which asks students in our community to show us ‘their Athens’ through their own photographs, is a great example of that.”
The Student Photography Contest is open to all young Athenians in grades 6 – 12 who are enrolled in CCSD. Submissions should include an original work as well as an artist’s statement describing their piece. The deadline for photograph submissions is November 1, 2022, and winners can pick up their matted and printed photographs in December 2022. A full list of guidelines and instructions on how to submit are available here.(opens in new tab)
By Maggie Dukes
