National

Critical Exposure partnered with Metro TeenAIDS, an organization committed to training youth to serve as peer educators on sexual health and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. We worked with their Young Women of Color Leadership Council, training students in the skills of photography, writing, and advocacy. Youth documented the lives of young people in D.C., interviewed D.C. youth and adults the sex education they have received, and drafted recommendations for how sex education can be strengthened in the District.

Albuquerque, NM - Critical Exposure worked with a small group of high school students to document the ways in which the promises of two court cases, Brown v. Board of Education and Mendez v. Westminster, have been fulfilled in their schools and how they remain unfulfilled. The students took photographs of their schools, wrote captions, and exhibited and spoke about their work during a Community Action Dialogue about education in Albuquerque.

Since February 2008, Critical Exposure has been working with middle and high school youth in New Orleans to document conditions in their schools following Hurricane Katrina. Youth from organizations across the city, including Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools, the Fyre Youth Squad, and Vietnamese American Young Leaders of New Orleans, are working together to ensure there is a strong youth voice in the school rebuilding process.

Critical Exposure provided high school students across the state of Pennsylvania with cameras and training to enable them to document the impact of underfunding on their education, in partnership with organizations like Youth United for Change in Philadelphia. The students’ images and writing became a central component of a campaign effort to engage the public around the issue of educational inequity, and to build public and political support for funding reform aimed at closing the tremendous “opportunity gap” that has existed in the state for decades.

Baltimore was the site of Critical Exposure’s first project. In 2004-2005, 75 students took thousands of photographs of conditions in their schools, both positive and negative. More than 2,000 people, including the CEO of Baltimore City Schools, attended exhibits and events featuring students and their photographs. Venues included art galleries, a public library, a local college, and Baltimore City Hall.