January 11, 2012
Editor’s Note: Omaha by Design is a financial supporter of The Teen Voices Project.
Photo by Andrew Forsman, a student at Benson High School.
The students are back from winter break. The cameras and tripods have been ordered. Thanks to the support of 144 community backers who contributed funds ranging from $5 to $5,000, The Teen Voices Project is under way at Benson High School (BHS).
The project, conceived by Jerred Zegelis and brought to life by Kickstarter, is turning a group of students into documentarians who will be capturing what life in North Omaha is like today.
“The students my school serves live mostly in the North Omaha area,” writes Zegelis, a photography and journalism teacher at BHS. “In the media, this area is often seen as a place that’s dangerous and infested with crime. While there are problems, the students we serve want the world to know there is much more to our community than what someone might see on television or in a news article.”
Some of the school’s advanced photography students are serving as group leaders on the project, Zegelis said. They will guide a class of beginning photography students through the documentation of the Benson area around a number of self-selected themes: diverse, selfless, historic, creative, successful, powerful and breaking stereotypes. The beginning students are currently studying documentary photography and will move to photographic composition in the near future. They are scheduled to receive their new cameras this week.
Once the final images have been selected, the students will produce a book featuring them, Zegelis said. Hundreds of the images will become a part of the community itself via a large-scale, temporary public art project, the details of which are still being finalized.
The Kickstarter funds, Zegelis said, have allowed him to purchase the equipment necessary to repeat the project each year with new groups of students. “We can together show that the world still cares about the powerful and artistic voice of teenagers and that maybe – just maybe – they can change the world – at least their part of the world – for the better,” he writes.
For more information about The Teen Voices Project, visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1394593468/the-teen-voices-project. For more information about Kickstarter, an online mechanism for funding and following creative projects, visit www.kickstarter.com.