Picture This!

Houston Center for Photography’s PictureThis! outreach program is a collaborative program with Texas Children’s Hospital’s Cancer and Hematology Center, and The Renal Center’s Quality of Life Program, where HCP teaching artists work with over 250 patients, their siblings, and other family members each year.

This photography-based arts program started in 2002, enabling the young patients to focus on healthy, youthful aspects of their lives by allowing them to look at their surroundings through a different perspective. In 2012, the program expanded, allowing us to work on long-term projects with children in their rooms in addition to the projects we create with children in the out-patient areas.

The work featured in this exhibition comes from an exploration of photography as an analog media, inviting the children to experience the uncertainty of the final look of a photograph, compared with the immediacy of digital photography. Teaching artists worked with children and their families using film and analog media for the most part, as children experimented with different lenses, shot multiple exposures, and drew on what could have been discarded film due to over or under-exposure. The results are a series of photographs that display the richness of their photographic exploration and document their daily lives as they receive treatment, interact with hospital staff, and share their clinical experience with their families.

—Juliana Forero, Ph.D.
Director of Education

ON VIEW
November 7–January 4, 2015