Art Therapy for Young Women

Photography is meant to be a means for creativity, self-expression and self-love in the lives of young women who have grown up in impoverished, difficult, often crime-ridden environments. The cameras, which the mostly black and Hispanic participants learned to use both on the streets and in a studio through a specially designed ICP curriculum, are envisioned as a tool for helping these women find the power to see themselves in new ways by controlling the self-image they put forth to others. The photographs the girls take of themselves and of one another are designed to become a sort of "weekly window on their lives". Art therapy is, in short, a strategy for enabling them to step outside their circumstances and see new potential in their lives and in themselves - possibly in the process challenging stereotypes and stigma, for these troubled women "struggle as much as or perhaps more than teenage boys with how they are viewed by society."

Photography, in particular, is thought to be an effective medium in part because it has low barriers to entry: "no need to know how to draw or paint, just a willingness to pick up a camera and try." By drawing on digital photography, this project offers "the added power of immediacy" in the form of "instantaneous images". One organiser from ICP commented, "Once the door is opened, they don't want to leave....I think because photography is so fluid and so immediate - it's reflecting back to them a sense of possibility in their lives they haven't seen before." As much as the cameras, computers and photos are intended to be therapeutic tools for the girls, simply seeing the doors of ICP (described as "a sleek Midtown art palace") regularly opened to them and their problems has also been boosted their spirits, according to organisers. "A lot of these girls never get out of their neighborhoods..." To further personalise and provide context for the portraits, essays accompany each picture; organisers are working to raise money to produce a book.

Young Women.

FOIA claims that women are the fastest growing population in prisons in the United States.