The Faces of LaGuardia photography project captures the global diversity of LaGuardia Community College's student body exclusively through portraits of LaGuardia students created by LaGuardia students.
A multi-faceted collaboration of the college's Marketing and Communications personnel, faculty members and students, it was structured as a contest open to the college's photography students. Mimicking a real world photo assignment, it challenged the students to do their best with one of the most difficult types of photographic representation, that of portraiture. Students had to find and engage their own subjects, obtain releases, schedule and conduct shooting sessions, edit their images, and submit on deadline.
A panel of judges consisting of members of the Photography and Marketing departments chose finalists from the students’ submissions, which exhibited an extraordinary wide range of techniques and styles. These photographs can be viewed in the Gallery section of this web site. A selection of these comprised the exhibition of prints that went on display in the LaGuardia Gallery of Photographic Arts and other public spaces around campus as well as off-campus. (Queens Borough Hall -Press Release)
Video and Print Documentation
In addition to the photography students involved in the project, four media studies students volunteered as a class assignment to document the entire project on video. Although they began with little to no experience, by working closely with the Marketing and Communications department, the students learned to shoot and conduct interviews, assemble, fine-cut and finish six short video programs. Just as the Faces contest mimicked a real world assignment to the photography students, the conditions under which the four video students worked paralleled real world pressures of an editing studio.
Yet another facet of the project involves a print journalism student intern who has conducted interviews with the four students of the video unit and written her own article that was published in the February issue of LiveWire and can be read at LiveWire (page 7).
The Faces of LaGuardia is rich with opportunity: for the students meeting professional level challenges in their respective fields; for the Marketing and the Academic departments to work closely on this collaboration; for the overall college and external communities to take in the compelling faces of LaGuardia.