The Concept
In conceiving My Story, My Home, we expected stories revealing both the diversity and the commonality within, between and across the Muslim and wider communities. We expected a glimpse into a world we didn’t know. Instead, we found the reality of empowering youth to share and shape their stories.
In our image-saturated world, news and online media can define a group. Millions of images and multiple perspectives are reduced to a dangerous few, leaving us to build stories of unfamiliar people and places from limited narratives.
This is where independent journalists and storytellers come in. We designed the project around 25 Muslim youth who could take the lead, sharing their homes and stories, countering the dominant media narrative.
What quickly came to the fore was both revelatory and pedestrian. They are teenagers before all else: using phones first, often to capture their lives of gaming, snap-chatting, taking selfies. The teens’ stories of home revolved around food, football, and friends — rather universal teen themes. They weren’t telling us a cultural or religious story, but a teenage story where culture and religion parallel the interests and intrigues of the teen years.
What also surprised us was the need for words to go with their images. Teens, when asked ‘How was your day?’ often don’t have much to say. Yet present them with a photo of their own making and stories emerge: a personal decision to wear the hijab, a fear of ignorance and a desire for western freedom, a longing for connection with family, the distance of war made real. Their images were not the story but a portal to their stories.
This is the power of an image to inspire conversations. This is the power and the learning from My Story, My Home. Let these photographs be a pathway to sharing stories and starting conversations.
~Tim Matsui, World Press Photo Winner 2015 for long documentary The Long Night.
Ryan Ammon, Mica Pereira, and Laura Strentz, World Press Photo Perth & MICA exhibitions
October 2016
Sponsorship and support provided by:
