SHERIDAN — The Center for a Vital Community at Sheridan College hosted an Essential Photovoice training through national organization Essential Partners, providing amateur photographers the opportunity to express their perception of the Sheridan community in snapshots. CVC Executive Director Amy Albrecht said the program was a great way to start important, and sometimes tough, conversations about community.
“We had done all this work in the past with Essential Partners who taught us all about reflective-structured dialogue and when they called us and said, ‘We have this pilot project that is matching and marrying that with photos, would you guys consider being our first cohort to try it?’ We were like, ‘Yes, please,’” Albrecht said. “We loved it so much and we learned so much that we couldn’t wait to just bring it to the community.”
Funded by a grant from the Fetzer Institute, Essential Photovoice brings community members together, challenging each participant to photograph elements of the community through their own eyes according to several different prompts including growth, change, belonging, preserving connections and more.
Being the pilot year of the Essential Photovoice project, Sheridan was one of six cities in the United States to be selected to host. The remaining five cities include Raleigh, North Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Gloucester, Massachusetts.
“The hope for Sheridan’s Essential Photovoice exhibition is to initiate conversations around the stories behind the photos and what they represent to both the photographer and the observer,” Albrecht said in a press release.
At the exhibition’s reception Thursday, held at the Whitney Center for the Arts, CVC moderator Cathi Kindt spoke of her experience working with the 22 participants from six weeks of training to the finished product.
“This was a very interesting learning process and we learned together throughout the six weeks, after the sessions and in bringing this to fruition,” Kindt said. “It takes the courage to make yourself vulnerable, to share your perspectives about our community in a group setting with people you may not know. It also takes confidence and self-awareness to display a personal photograph, tell its story with clarity and offer insight into your core values.”
Ryan Landis, participant of the project, also spoke highly of his experience in the program and the importance and intrigue of different perspectives in the community.
“I thought it was great to be able to experience what community means for other individuals,” Landis said. “In times of dialogue and sharing and being able to hear and then ask questions about why people’s views were that way and then have them respond, sometimes to whimsical and almost unrelated comments that they may have made, that helped us dig deeper into who that individual was.
“It really helped me be able to see what community means to those specifically who have grown up here or have lived here their entire lives and how that experience has changed and shifted with each new successive wave of folks that are relocating to this community just like myself,” Landis continued.
As for the future of Essential Photovoice, Albrecht said CVC plans to implement the project at the high school level.
“Essential Photovoice for us, for the CVC, is the most amazing way to have yet another really important conversation in our community and we love it for this,” Albrecht said.
The Essential Photovoice exhibition is open to the public at the Whitney Center for the Arts through March 24.
