Date: Friday 2 August 2019 – Saturday 28 September 2019
What’s it like to be sixteen years old now?
This major touring exhibition brings together leading contemporary photographers with more than one hundred and seventy young people from diverse communities across the country. Using video, photography, writing, audio recordings and social media, this collaboration gives prominence to voices rarely heard.
Photographer Craig Easton conceived this project at the time of the Scottish independence referendum when sixteen year olds were given the vote for the first time. He later invited fellow photographers Robert C Brady, Linda Brownlee, David Copeland, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Cristopher Nunn, Kate Peters, Simon Roberts, Michelle Sank and Abbie Taylor-Smith to join him and develop the project across the UK.
The Atkinson presents a specially selected sequence of portraits from the larger SIXTEEN series. The reciprocal trust that emerged between the photographers and the sixteen year olds is palpable in the strength of the imagery and the young people’s candid reflections on their hopes and fears and who and what inspires them. These two elements give the project potency at a time of national anxiety and highlight how social background, gender, ethnicity and location influence teenager lives and ambition.
SIXTEEN
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SIXTEEN is a touring programme of exhibitions and events kindly supported by and in partnership with: