Cheyenne River: Images

In 2005, I founded a photography program for youths on Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. In this ongoing project, my students and I photograph together, share our images while they're still in the viewfinder, and operate as both subjects and photographers.

Our favorite locations are the fields and abandoned buildings on the fringes of town, forgotten places thick with the past that lend themselves to imaginary games and textured photographs.

Children have a unique ability to experience love and joy alongside pain, without compartmentalizing their experiences. I seek to convey this complexity. My images explore play as a vehicle through which youth reveal and negotiate their emotions, traumas, and desires.

Over the course of four years, we have documented our relationships with one another and this land. Accordingly, the validity and meaning of my images are tied to the mutual context of their creation. Ultimately these images will be exhibited alongside the children’s work, which present the other parts of the whole.

(To view the children's photographs, click on My Viewpoint )