Seen and Heard by Mary Motley Kalergis

A collection of black-and-white photographs accompanied by interviews from 50 American teenagers, who talk about what their lives are like.

They include a farmer's son and a recent immigrant from Mexico, kids from small towns and the daughter of famous parents. There are poets, baton twirlers, football stars, and skateboarders. Given the opportunity, even the most rebellious of the book's subjects admits he lies awake worrying at night, because he is "getting a little bit scared" about the future. "I want to be as fearlessly honest as I can while I'm alive," another of the interviewees declares.

The book shows how photography can be used as a tool for opening communication between adults and young people.

Buy it and read the reviews on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Seen-Heard-Teenagers-About-Their/dp/1556708343

Through Hmong Eyes

On a recent trip to Vietnam I came across the book Through H'Mong Eyes, published by the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi. The book is the outcome of a participatory photography project funded with a grant from the Toyota Foundation. Hmong girls from SaPa in Northern Vietnam were given cameras to documented their lives in words and photos for the book. The book I believe dates from 2003.

By mixing images with written stories the book provided an opportunity for the girls voices to be heard by audiences at local, national and global levels. It also created an awareness of the Hmong not as objects of study – as they have so often been treated in the past – but as active agents and subjects, the shapers of their own identity.”

The book also shows the dilema that so many young people face living in popular tourist destinations like SaPa that were until relatively recently fairly remote. The young people still wish to retain many of their traditional customs as well as embrace so called modern customs.

The book was also used as source material for a feminist essay on Contemporary Women's Roles in Vietnam: http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1452811/contemporary_womens_roles_through_hmong_vietnamese_and_american_eyes/index.html:

To get a copy of the book I'm afraid you are going to have to visit the Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi or scour the many second hand book shops in Hanoi. Good luck.

Identity by Catherine Balet

I use this book alot in workshops with young people to explore ideas around identity. In the book photographer Catherine Balet took pictures of signs, labels, codes and icons that have social and aesthetic significance in the teenage world from across Europe. Here's the blurb:

"Teenagers in their struggle for identity and self-esteem, troubled by an urgent desire to be different, usually adopt the codes of a group, often inspired by music trends and always tweaked by circumstance, conscious individuation or both. In each city, Balet discovered the same music, fashion, brands, bands and labels. Only the details differed, reflecting the complexity of the history of each country or the influence of its migrant populations.

In London and Barcelona, where the uniform is a school institution, details are all that students have by which to define themselves: Balet captures the way's in which these students customize their outfits. Her large, richly descriptive portraits, set in the street, combine documentary style with poetic sensibility, capture the complex mix of youth and age inherent to adolescence, and the era's new mix of global homogenization and local individuation."

You can buy the book on Amazon and read reviews at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Catherine-Balet-Identity/dp/3865212263/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280010138&sr=8-1