The Neighborhood Story Project works with students at John McDonogh Senior High on documentary projects about their communities. Although our primary goal is to create nuanced portraits of people and places in New Orleans, we also want to share our experiences with other communities around the country and globe. Over the last few years, we have been working on exchanges to learn about what we have in common, and how we are unique.

In January of 2007, we hosted Australian social ecologist and digital photographer Maya Haviland as an artist-in-residence. Maya runs digital photography workshops in the Kimberley region of Northwest Australia. She brought an exhibition of her students’ work, Community Art in the Kimberley: Faces of Mowanjum, for New Orleanians to learn about Aboriginal cultures in Australia. She hung the exhibition at Xavier University with the support of the Xavier Art Department, and gave a number of talks about the theory and practice behind the project.

During the rest of her residency, we developed a photography and writing curriculum, and then worked with two wonderful teachers at John McDonogh Senior High, Emelda Wylie and Prisca Washington, to organize four days of workshops with their tenth grade classes. We began the workshops by using images from our programs in the Kimberley and New Orleans to discuss how to take a good photograph. Students were then asked to take portraits of themselves and their classmates to show different sides of themselves.

To generate stories to complement the photographs, we wrote together. The first workshop asked John Mac students to pick photographs taken by the Mowanjum students, and to write about what was going on in the image. In the second workshop, they responded to the prompt, “What people don’t know about me.”

On the last day, students from both classes took a field trip to see Faces of Mowanjum. They wrote to the Mowanjum photographers, and viewed a slide show of their own work. The best of their photographs were compiled into a book entitled What People Don't Know.

What People Don’t Know traveled back to Western Australia, with letters from the John Mac students enclosed. In the words of Daphine Lefort, “This is a message to the Kimberley people: You are wonderful people and our land isn’t anything like y’all’s. To me, your pictures and story remind me of Hurricane Katrina all over again because our land was washed away and we’ve been treated wrong, too. Keep your head up and never give up.” Maya used the book as a model in her photography course at Mowanjum. The subsequent booklet, About Us, was sent back to New Orleans with this message:

“In April 2007 we did a similar writing and photography workshop as part of our Youth Program in Mowanjum. We made the book by working together taking photos of each other and writing about ourselves. All About Us tells some things about us that people don’t know. We made it to introduce ourselves to the New Orleans mob and for other people who want to read it.

We have made our book as part of an ongoing exchange between our community and the New Orleans Neighborhood Story Project, and we hope you like it and keep in touch.”

Both volumes can be downloaded on this website.