Puberty is an awkward age for most people. Your body starts to morph. You grow hair in places you never knew existed. Girls grow breasts and begin their menstrual cycles; boys grow taller and begin to shave.
Puberty is an awkward age for most people. Your body starts to morph. You grow hair in places you never knew existed. Girls grow breasts and begin their menstrual cycles; boys grow taller and begin to shave.
Despite it being an inevitable natural process, there are many adolescents who struggle to accept puberty, and as a result suffer from such a negative self-image that they struggle to accept themselves.
Images of what it supposedly means to be beautiful are splashed across the pages of glossy magazines and other media, which tends to set trends and manipulate perceptions, especially of individuals in the extremely self-conscious age range of 13 to 18.
This often leads to adolescents experiencing negative feelings of inadequacy; self-esteems which interpolate a lack of beauty within themselves in the face of social pressure to conform to particular ideals.
Project Boost
Project Boost, a Grahamstown youth project, is headed by four photography students from the Rhodes University journalism department: Melanie van Zyl, Robyn Peatfield, Mia van der Merwe and Leigh Worswick.
These four female students have proposed a case study where they target the idea of confidence
and self-esteem as a large umbrella topic concerned with Grahamstown youth.
“As a photojournalist I occupy a unique position in possessing the skills to aid other people and
commit to affecting change in the community,” assured Melanie van Zyl. “By organizing personal
photo shoots for children, I will touch on issues of the body…they can inform me of their feelings
toward their bodies through photography”.
Successful re-education through photography?
When asked what van Zyl wishes to achieve, she stated that she wants to inform the youth that
everyone is beautiful, and that “there is no need to get bogged down in stereotypes of beauty.”
Boost aims to involve Grahamstonians in voicing their own issues by working collaboratively with
journalists who have had access to training. They shall be targeting Grahamstown youths of various
backgrounds (sex, race, class and age).
The youths who will be targeted will be from Grahamstonian schools, between the ages of 15 and 17 who are going through puberty and as a result struggling with their self-image.
“The aim is to try and reach youth who need an avenue through which to voice their issues and concerns in order to solve their said problem,” assured van Zyl.
The Boost team will be hosting ‘cut and paste’ workshops. These workshops would require the selected youths to recreate pictures of beauty by using old magazines. These ‘cut and paste’ images which are recreated will then be photographed and made into posters around the community.
“I would like to use these workshops as a base to get conversation going and get youth to open up about their appearance and notions of both beauty and identity,” explained van Zyl.
Boost aims to ultimately facilitate focus groups which would require the participants to brainstorm portrait ideas, then plan and decide on photo-shoot ideas.
“Older citizens should also be consulted and involved in order to reflect on their roles as influencers of the notion of beauty in the minds of our youth,” said van Zyl.
Great practitioners such as Annie Leibovitz raised the importance in the construction of portraits and the importance that they bequeath in imparting social knowledge and greater self-understanding.
Boost will be hosting their photographic exhibition of their collected portrait work on Thursday 18 October at the Albany Natural Science Museum from 16:00, St. Peters Campus, Rhodes University.
We can see for ourselves whether this unique medium of photography will be able to overcome insecurities, and allow youth to be youth, to be adolescents. To allow me to be me, and allow you to
be you.
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