Community Photography - Consider It All Joy

 I’ve been through some bad times, and I’ve been through some good times, and the Lord says consider it all joy.  

--Frances Cannon interviewed by Jessica Napier

 Those words from SKCTC student Jessica Napier’s grandmother Frances Cannon ended up in the script of Higher Ground.  They also provided the title for the Harlan County PACT Project’s traveling photography exhibit, Consider It All Joy.

Click for 'Consider It All Joy' Gallery

 On October 22^nd, 2005, Consider It All Joy, the third and final community photography exhibit drawn from the thousands of photographs taken by local people and visiting artists during the past three years opened. Over six hundred Harlan County residents, aged two to ninety-two took single-use cameras and photographed what was important to them, the strengths of their communities, and the things that need work in their communities. Approximately one hundred community curators then took the thousands of pictures that resulted and grouped them into themes.

Among the participants were students at Wallins, Hall, Cumberland, and Holy Trinity elementary schools; students at Evarts and James A. Cawood high schools; students at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College and the Southeast adult education program; youngsters at the Cawood Ledford Boys & Girls Club; and community members from throughout Harlan County. This exhibit was created in collaboration with the Photography Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cumberland-born and Tennessee-based photographer Malcolm Wilson. The local photographers also took UNC professor of photography Jeff Whetstone and his students around and helped them take pictures.  Seventy pictures from past PACT exhibits were reprinted, framed, and displayed in the Godbey Gallery.  The rest of the thousands of pictures generated by the project were displayed in the halls of the Godbey Center. Danielle Burke served as the community coordinator and archivist for the project.

The final exhibit that coincided with the premiere of Higher Ground was a selection of community photographs professionally printed and framed for the gallery and we had all these pictures, thousands, in the hallways in the college here.  I helped put those up and of course I’ve lived with them now for a couple semesters and they are powerful.  There are powerful stories on our walls. Then the premiere weekend of Higher Ground, I walked through the gallery by myself and looked at those pictures on the wall and it brought tears to my eyes because I have been here almost 20 years but I don’t think I’ve seen anything that powerful in an exhibit. And I really had to say this may be the first time I ever really did see this place from the inside out.

- Ann Schertz, Higher Ground musical director

In March 2006, Consider It All Joy traveled to Louisville and Spalding University. Joyce Ogden, Spalding professor of art and our collaborator on the tile mosaic project, hosted project participants Connie Owens and Danielle Burke, who traveled to Louisville and talked with Ogden’s students during a class and an at-large audience in the gallery on March 27^th.  Consider It All Joy was also displayed at The Artists Attic, a gallery in the city of Harlan, in May 2006.

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