'Our Democracy' exhibit and reception
Photographs taken by Grundy High School students are currently on display as part of the "Our Democracy" project initiated by photojournalist Andrea Bruce. Ms. Bruce met with the students last spring in their classrooms and shared her own experiences chronicling the world’s most troubled areas, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many different perspectives on democracy she heard from those looking at it from afar, those aspiring toward it, and those trying to understand it...s meaning. She talked with them about what she learned from the scholars she worked with at Harvard during a fellowship focusing on democracy, and encouraged the students to think about their own lives, their own community and their own ideas about what democracy means to them. Then, using their cell phones, the students were challenged to make photographs that reflected those thoughts.
‘Our Democracy,” is a collaborative photography project in which everyday people in communities both large and small are invited to explore (in visual terms) the meaning of democracy and how it fits into their ideas about community, citizenship and the role of government in their lives. Photographs are uploaded to an Instagram page curated by Bruce, and the project will culminate in a large traveling exhibition of images selected by Bruce as well as a book. She envisions the project as a “visual record that documents the state of democracy at this moment in US history.”