InSight Exhibit Opening at the Autry
InSight: Indigenous Youth, Digital Images and Violence Prevention
Photography Exhibit
Opening Reception, Tuesday, October 16, 2012
5 p.m. -7 p.m.
Autry National Center West Student Art Gallery
The themes were:
- Where we come from
- Life
- Things we want to ignore
- Ways we avoid violenceThe youths gave the InSight researchers approximately 1,900 photographs and selected from their images the ones they wanted to represent the group’s themesThe selected images represent a deep and intimate engagement with the photographer’s location, identity, families (including pets), and dreams for the future. They are visual meditations on the structuring of violence through urban landscapes and surrounding poverties, as well as the importance of relationships, particularly with friends and family members.
Photography can reveal ways in which the world is constructed through systems of meaning, optical vantage points, visual manipulation, and the contextual terms of presentation and reception. Its elasticity bears relevance in fields as varied as art, ethnography, state surveillance, citizen journalism, memory and recollection, debates around (visual) empiricism, and the significance of communal rituals and bonding. Visual literacy, digital acuity, and critical faculties can be crucial for contemporary cultural citizenship.
The InSight project was a collaboration between UCLA’s Gender Studies Department and the American Indian Studies Center with support and assistance from the American Indian Community Council, Los Angeles.