Exploring the Space Between Two Places through Photo Montage
In January 2021, I started a personal project called Here + There. For this project, I used composite photography to explore themes of identity and place in my own life. Each composite photo combined images from at least two places that I had lived. My initial focus was on scenes from Southeast Asia and Virginia (my two most recent places of residence). I posted these images to my Instagram account, @ekvernen, using the #herethereimage hashtag.
As I continued experimenting with these images, I decided that it might be interesting to expand this idea into a workshop for local students from refugee or immigrant backgrounds. The three workshops below are the result of these further explorations.
Projects
Here + There: Exploring Multi-layered Identity through Photography
Here + There was an exhibition of photographic compositions created by high school students that gave visual form to their lived experience as refugees. The work stemmed from a photography-focused community arts workshop held at James Madison University in May & June 2021 that I taught. As part of the workshop, each student created a composite of two different photographs that represented the multi-layered reality of the artist’s personal identity. Read more »
Here + There at Skyline Middle School
In March 2022, I designed and led another Here + There workshop at Skyline Middle School in Harrisonburg. During this 4‑week workshop, 7th and 8th graders who were new to the United States and still learning English used their growing language skills to write about their home countries, and to combine images of what they liked about the United States and what they remember about their home countries into a composite image. The images were then exhibited at the school for their peers and teachers. Read more »