Michelle Green, a visual arts teacher in her eighth year at Jefferson Middle School Academy, and her students attended last Wednesday's opening of the "Everyday DC" exhibit at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery. The exhibit features photographs by DC middle school students that seek to capture daily life in the District. (Photo by Jennifer Anne)

Middle-schoolers ‘take control of their own narrative’ with Everyday DC photo project

By Jennifer Anne Mitchell On Mar 12, 2019 Last updated Mar 14, 2019

About 100 people celebrated last week’s opening of an art exhibition at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery full of revealing photographs of daily life in DC’s neighborhoods — but instead of wine at the reception, there were Capri Suns.

Created by students from 15 middle schools across all four quadrants of the District, the third annual exhibit is part of a program called Everyday DC, which seeks to tell a story of the city that is not covered by mainstream media.

The students created the exhibit with the help of DC Public Schools visual arts instructors during a multi-week photojournalism unit that the school system developed with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit organization that supports journalists covering high-stakes issues. The youth took the 140-plus photographs, curated the entire show and wrote the text on exhibition materials, which noted “in DC, you can write your own story. You can choose your own path. This is ours.”

“When we Google ‘DC,’ it shows monuments and tourist attractions, [and on the news] they show a lot of crimes,” said Morgan Shirley, a student at Jefferson Middle School Academy. “But in this exhibit, we show that DC is diverse — and how much we love and care about each other.”

Fareed Mostoufi, senior education manager at the Pulitzer Center, explained that the project is embedded in the DCPS curriculum and has been diligently improved since it was first implemented three years ago.

After a successful first year funded solely by the Pulitzer Center, the project received money from DCPS and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which lists the Pulitzer Center as a grant recipient through its Arts and Humanities Education Projects program in 2018 and 2019. The center received $20,000 each year, which is the most consecutively awarded to any institution during that time frame.

Wednesday night’s gallery opening demonstrated how far the project has come. Mostoufi reminisced about the first year of the exhibition, at the Southwest arts and cultural collective Blind Whino, which was “much more grassroots [with] smaller pictures that were taped to the wall.”

The “Everyday DC” exhibit features portraits taken by DC Public Schools students who participated in the third year of the program, which includes lessons in photography. (Photo by Jennifer Anne)

A team effort

When Mary Lambert, director of arts at DCPS, welcomed the audience to last week’s reception, she emphasized that the District’s school system is “committed to helping students find their voice through visual, digital, music, theater, dance and vocal arts. We’re thankful to the Pulitzer Center for helping us make that reality come through in a photography lens.”

Michelle Green, a visual arts teacher in her eighth year at Jefferson Middle School Academy, has been with the project from the beginning. Green said that she and Mostoufi had known each other for nearly a decade through professional partnerships when they reconnected a few years ago at a professional development event and talked about collaborating again. Mostoufi told her about his vision for the Everyday DC program, and they decided to work on its development together.

Five other DCPS teachers joined Green as the first instructors to participate in the program, which was “very bare bones to start,” she said. “[The Pulitzer Center] had a few sample lesson ideas; they held two Saturday workshops for the teachers where they taught us how to teach photography to the kids.”

All of the exhibit images are digital photos taken with cellphones because most students have cellphones but only a few have point-and-shoot cameras. The curriculum is now fully developed, including complete lesson plans and accompanying worksheets.

To prepare the students to curate their exhibit this year, Green asked the participants to select one photo and then select five others from their classmates’ collections that they thought related to it. Then the students came up with a title and a theme to tell a story with the photo montage.

The students’ thoughtfulness shows on the walls of the Pepco Gallery. The section called “In My Shoes,” derived from the phrase “walk a mile in my shoes,” is one of Green’s favorites. A few of the participants told The DC Line that they gained an understanding of how to consider different perspectives throughout the process of learning photography, taking pictures of the city and reviewing their classmates’ work to curate the exhibition.

“Creating this project we worked with other curators,” said Shirley. “We couldn’t just put only our input. We had to consider others’ feelings and what they wanted also.”

One of Shirley’s classmates, Shakayla Clark-Day, concurred. “I learned how to improve my teamwork skills,” she said. “And I also learned that everyone perceives the world differently.”

Global reach

Changing the perspectives of all those who interact with the project — students, teachers, families and the public — has been a goal of Everyday DC since the start of the program.

An article on the Pulitzer Center’s website about the first exhibit in 2017 quoted Stephanie Batres, then an eighth-grader at Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, as saying the project broadened her views on the world: “There are a lot of beautiful places that I never really looked at because I would always be rushing past them, but with this project I got to see what the real DC is — and actually experience it.”

At least once each year, a journalist and a Pulitzer Center staff member visit the participating classes to share their expertise and help the students recognize their potential. “They are seeing, hopefully, themselves as artists and as journalists,” Mostoufi said.

A map in the gallery identifies the 15 schools across the city where students participated in the “Everyday DC” project. (Photo by Jennifer Anne)

The project was inspired by the Instagram sensation Everyday Africa, which journalists Austin Merrill and Peter DiCampo created in March 2012 to document day-to-day life in Africa. At the time, Merrill and DiCampo were on assignment in Ivory Coast through a grant from the Pulitzer Center. They realized that their coverage, because it was limited largely to breaking news, didn’t present a full picture and often ended up perpetuating stereotypes.

“If you expanded your field of view beyond the people that we were talking to or photographing, we saw kids going to school, friends meeting for meals and adults going to work,” Merrill shared at the opening reception. “Yet you never saw it. Not on the news, not in the movies, not in those charity ads on TV.”

Merrill and DiCampo decided that it was critical to show members of the public what they typically didn’t see. They used cellphone cameras to take photos of everyday life, and then added more photographers to their project team. Now most of the photographers for Everyday Africa are African.

Now popular in Afghanistan, North Korea and many other countries, the concept is known collectively as The Everyday Projects. In addition, there are Instagram feeds based on themes such as incarceration, migration and climate change, as well as others for locales in the U.S. and around the world such as the Bronx, New Orleans, Mumbai and Kandahar.

Does all of this mesh with Merrill’s expectations for the project when he and DiCampo launched it almost exactly seven years ago? “This is what I would have hoped it’d be — a community of young people inspired to learn about their world, inspired to take control of their own narrative, and inspired to bridge gaps and understanding and mend the harm done by crude stereotypes,” Merrill said in his remarks at the exhibit opening.

Merrill described Everyday DC as the most successful of the Everyday Projects, having become a required unit in the DCPS middle school curriculum. The District’s public schools and the Pulitzer Center plan to continue showcasing the artwork from the Everyday DC program annually in the spring, with a long-term goal of offering a fall show as well.

“This project helps our students understand the significance of one’s own perspectives,” noted DCPS’ Lambert. “We hope as you see this narrative of DC through the eyes of an 11-, 12- and 13-year-old that it takes you to a new level of perspective and empathy as well.”

Clark-Day and the other student curators faced a considerable challenge with only 15 gallery walls on which to tell the whole story of DC, but she spoke proudly of the results of their hard work. “I think today we overcame the stereotypes,” she said.

Everyday DC is on view through March 20 at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery, 702 8th St. NW. The exhibit is free and open to the public Tuesday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m.