So this is part of a thing I’m doing / have been involved in for awhile. My big current after-work work is designing a series of 13 posters to go up in MUNI bus shelters across San Francisco using the work created during the collaborative class that 826 Valencia (where I used to be a design intern at) and First Exposures (where I was / will continue to be a mentor at) had last spring. Basically all these random parts of my volunteer life in SF collided and I said I’d be more than happy to help in developing any output. There’s going to be this bus shelter campaign, then I’ll be heading up laying out a book come winter and there will be an exhibition featuring the original works in their complete form at SF Camerawork in January. All of this is awesome. (And I don’t mean for me, I mean for the kids.)

But this piece in particular is sort of near and dear to me as it’s the group I worked with. Getting everyone to work together and be productive took effort and all, but it soon became pretty apparent that all the kids wanted to do was find a way to define their rebellion, their anxiety towards a world they felt could be improved; the central theme they came up with was “What if San Francisco could be something it’s not, what if it could be better?”

Discussions amounted to dealing with seeing all the users in the Tenderloin (where myself and two of the kids live), the trash on the streets about town, the pressure to succeed and the desire to grow up – or at least not be constrained by the rules that come with early teenage life – and this ridiculous and unrelenting optimism that they had were the topic of every meeting.

And though the process was arduous at points, the result just astounds me. Dane, my friend and co-mentor of the group, and I just sort of half-guided everything. The kids came up with every concept, every line of thought and everything to photograph. They wanted to showcase street art, skateboarding, and things vaguely outside the lines of the law as methods of expression that they felt were too restricting in an urban environment. That they wanted certain freedoms and felt the penalties for expressing themselves were too harsh for a world that is so often brutal.

Every group had a different theme and idea for their project. I guess it was just great to see the kids you work with for weeks come to the conclusion that the message they want to deliver, the voice they want to be heard, is that of their own independence. Being involved with this reminds me of hearing punk rock for the first time.

My overall goal for this is to honor the work of the kids as much as possible; while I put pressure on myself for any publicly visible work, I feel that delivering the vision of the students is by far a more important aspect, for they’ve all put their trust in me to stay true to their intentions. And I look at this work and though this one piece is incredibly cut down from what will be in the book and certainly cut from what will be in the show (the writer, Evelyn, is so phenomenal that after reading the pages of free verse she crafted in response to the photography I am now certain she will be published at a very young age and it’s unfortunate we could only fit her two sentences in this poster) … the content is still more inspiring to me than anything I’ve seen lately.

To keep the wonder, angst and idealism of youth is to survive as yourself in the world. And to be a part of organizations that promote it is everything.