EDWARD CASTRO,
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
ASHLEY PAPIAS,
LEAD PHOTOGRAPHER
THALIA BERNAL,
LEAD EDITOR
EDUARDO MARTINEZ,
VIDEO DIRECTOR
MICHAEL VALENZUELA,
PHOTOGRAPHER
FLORENCIA VALENZUELA,
PHOTOGRAPHER
CATHIE ARTEAGA,
PHOTOGRAPHER
MICHAEL PAPIAS,
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
ABOUT US
All creative labor conducted for the We Are Healing series is led by The Foster Youth Photo Crew (FYPC)---a team of former foster youth photographers challenging the visual language that traditionally confines foster youth to a harmful stereotype.
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FYPC was born in 2020 by foster youth located across California's Bay Area. The crew consisted of four foster youth shooting on disposable cameras---creating personal archives through an analog medium and generating artist zines accompanied by original writings from each artist. In 2022, the Foster Youth Photo Crew transitioned to Southern California and secured multiple grants to assist in the continuation of the program---equipment purchases have been made possible through generous donors. Now, all FYPC members have access to 35mm SLR cameras and two medium format 120mm cameras. In 2024, the photo crew consists of 15 members, with crew members located across the state of California!
A 2022 FYPC badge that holds a members: aka's/nicknames, training completion stickers, and other crew member identifying information used internally by FYPC
In 2021, Journey House's Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program established the Art on the Wall (A-WALL) initiative, with the goal to exhibit foster youth artwork across all public and private spaces. A-WALL seeks to challenge the art world's approach to the foster youth art practice and bring accountability to our larger social commitments to the creativity of former foster youth. VAPA is committed to assisting former foster youth in obtaining full-time careers in California's creative economy through our community programming and industry advocacy---we need full-time artists, with lived experience, working in the creative economy.
FYPC is currently hosted by VAPA through the A-WALL initiative---assisting FYPC in having a physical space to work from, offering mentorship in building collections of work, and fighting to exhibit original community photographs across private/public spaces. Our host/residency relationship has allowed for an immense amount of collaboration between and across foster youth artists engaged in building an intentional and deeply reflexive foster youth art practice.​
REFERENCE POINTS:
THE KAMOINGE
WORKSHOP
Kamoinge Portrait, 1973
The Foster Youth Photo Crew is one thread interlaced into a longer historical conversation, built over many years by historically marginalized artists from across the colonial world. FYPC acknowledges the trail blazers that have come before us----critical thinking artists that engage in battles against institutional racism, bigots, and social punishment in their fight for a true body of visual work that does not compromise the strength of the historically marginalized world.
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FYPC's largest historical reference point---a giant---is the 1960's New York City based Black photography collective: The Kamoinge Workshop. A group of artists who used their cultural perspectives to develop an authentic visual telling of the Black experience within the US context. The Kamoinge Workshop developed several portfolios of work countering the stereotype that constrained the Black identity to oppression---purposefully engaging in showcasing the center and margins of power, strength, and beauty in an attacked group.
"We set out to create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we'd witnessed and that countered the untruths
we'd all seen in
mainline publications."
- Louis Draper,
Kamoinge Workshop Founding Member
FYPC's birth has only been possible through the labor led by artists from The Kamoinge Workshop and other historically marginalized thinkers that have built counter narratives against oppression for generations. These true revolutionary bodies of visual work have sought more than simple representation and instead have pushed forward actualized change.
The Foster Youth Photo Crew seeks to remove the barriers that prevent former foster youth from accessing self-exploration by giving each member the physical tools and knowledge to build personal collections of work. We have seen each member begin to fight back against the loss that is intimately tied to the foster youth identity. Equipped with their own cameras, members have begun a journey to build their own family archives, document the moments that truly capture their joy, and work with one another to combat the larger systemic violent images that control the foster youth identity.
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The work that has been built by FYPC over the past 3 years, has sidestepped the stock image of the foster youth identity and instead allowed new self-expressions to re-control a narrative that has been out of the community's hands for so long.​
The Foster Youth Photo Crew Portrait, 2023
FYPC is standing in a chamber of mirrors, an archive with past and current thinkers spitting their streams of thoughts---all colliding and collapsing under its own weight. The colors burn onto one another, fractions of light slice the other, and refractions are harnessed to generate a true portrait. The Foster Youth Photo Crew challenges visual language through a creation of a new-ness.
The foster youth stereotype is dead and FYPC stands over it---in its place, a collection of smiles, consciousness, and the words of a people that take shape through sound.
What does it really mean to decolonize design history?
For me, it means taking away all forms of text and centering the object...use the object as a way to open up possibilities of how we tell counterpublic stories.
Professor Jennifer Rittner,
Parsons School of Design
FYPC visits The Getty, 2023
ACKNOWLEDGING INVISIBLE LABOR
No project is ever completed by a single individual or entity---FYPC acknowledges all of the invisible labor that took place to make the We Are Healing photo essays come to life. We received an immense amount of community support to build this collection of images, taking the shape of: production assistants volunteering on set, community friends offering us studio time, free equipment rentals, materials, food, creative advice, connecting FYPC with community resources, and so much more!
The Foster Youth Photo Crew offers a sincere thank you for everyone's labor that took place in front of and behind the lens!
INDIVIDUALS
Dwayne Johnson
Arturo Peña
Jonathan Esquivel
Jesse Garcia
Roselynn Hernandez
Eduardo Medrano Jr.
Chrissy Arlen
Mia Lewis
Selena Liu-Raphael
Isaac Papias
William Camargo
Alkaid Ramirez
Carlos Tinoco
Frank and Jennyfer
Mike and Dess
Jessica Coreas
Anna Judson
Laurie Parker
Sebastian Millan
Quincy Wright-Baptiste
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ORGANIZATIONS
A Home Within
The Snap Foundation
The California Catalyst Center
The East LA Film Shop
The John Doe Gallery
818 Community Darkroom
Kids in the Spotlight
Music is Unity Foundation
Fuerza Records
Love 14k
San Marino Women's Club
OP/TECH USA
Brevitē
Japan Camera Hunter
Blue Moon Camera
Inclusive Excellence Hub, UC Berkeley
Hope Scholars, UC Berkeley
Octavia Lab - LA Central Library
Mo' Fundementals
If you are interested in partnering with FYPC, exhibiting images from the We Are Healing series, making a donation, sharing resources, or if you simply want to have a conversation to learn more on how you can support our work, please email:
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Michael Papias