Lindsay Morris’s camera takes her, and us, into people’s lives. She has photographed farmers here and out West, life on the Mississippi Delta, E.M.T.s in Sag Harbor, inmate gardeners on Rikers Island, and children, including her own.
Her most recent project, “A Small Taste of Freedom,” which will open Friday at Guild Hall, focuses on the here and now and close to home. Undertaken with Anthony Madonna, Guild Hall’s fellow in arts education, the exhibition consists of portraits and audio interviews of members of the Guild Hall Teen Arts Council captured while they were living under quarantine.
For several years, Ms. Morris had been taking pictures of her son’s friends, most of them young women about to leave home for college. “It just seemed like they were on the cusp of womanhood, and it was a really perfect time to capture them,” she said during a Zoom conversation. Then the pandemic hit.
At the same time, Mr. Madonna had to cancel the weekly in-person meetings of the teen arts council. The program was founded in 2017 to bring teenagers into Guild Hall’s orbit as paid employees helping to organize programs, develop their own creativity, and cultivate Guild Hall’s relationship with the local teenage community.
After two weeks, all 15 members of the council told Mr. Madonna they needed to resume meeting. “So we started on the Zoom platform. And very quickly they realized that no one is talking about the teen experience, or their experience under quarantine.” It was Andrea Grover, Guild Hall’s executive director, who suggested he look into Ms. Morris’s work.
She had been photographing her son’s friends with cars, which served as a metaphor for their transition into adulthood. “Anthony asked if I would consider segueing into a similar but different project, one that had to do with the kids being in quarantine. Cars no longer represented the next step in their lives, but rather escape from the claustrophobia of being at home.”
Mounted in Guild Hall’s lobby gallery, “A Small Taste of Freedom” will include 12 large-scale portraits and audio recordings, made by the teenagers themselves, that can be accessed with mobile devices capable of scanning a QR code.
“I always want to mix the different mediums into one idea or concept,” said Mr. Madonna. As the teenagers put their thoughts into writing, “this was an opportunity to go from thought to literary to visual, and then we moved to audio as well. It was incredible for this group to see how real concerns of theirs could be expressed through creative media.”
In the recordings, all of the participants express anxiety about life during Covid-19. As one council member said, “The coronavirus has affected me during the most anticipated time of my life . . . [My family and I] worry about if we have any food left in our fridge, we worry about our relatives working their essential jobs, we worry about everyone suffering. . . .”
“The foundation of what we rely on has fallen through,” said another. “We are left to grapple with so much uncertainty. We worry about our jobs, our parents’ and friends’ jobs, their health, immigration status, access to health care, and so much more.”
Ms. Morris asked the teenagers to choose the site where they wanted to be photographed, and the vehicle. “For some kids it was a car, but not all of them are of driving age, or they don’t have cars, so it could be a skateboard, or a bike, and for one girl it was her feet. She walks away when she needs to get away from home.”
The participating teenagers are Yanni Bitis, Brianna Calle, Greer Costello, Tiffany Farez, Sofie Healey, Amanda Krähe, Gigi Lama, Mia Pardini, Anni Spacek, Kathleen Berrezueta, Han Le, Camila Moscoso, and Brontë Zunis. The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 3.
