The AjA Archive

We want the AjA Archive to be a reflection of our community.

At The AjA Project we want to acknowledge our participants as documentarians of their own history. By introducing photography within the context of advocacy, we hope to empower youth, by exploring the power and impact of documentary art. With our photography programming, we are able to provide hands on experience, by putting DSLR cameras in the hands of our students, and providing a safe space to exercise the language of visual arts. Our curriculum asks students to think critically about the images they see, or importantly the image they don’t see, and use that information to produce images with the intent and purpose to take control of their personal narratives and of those in their community.

With the AjA Archive, we ask youth in our programs to contribute their images, to help build an authentic and accurate history of our communities. The AjA Project has a 20 year collection of media, images inspired from the eyes of our participants, sharing an intimate view of who they are and what they care about. Through the discussion of these images, we are able to learn about deeper understanding about what our community is experiencing, and what actionable steps we can take to support the community through our programing.

We are taking proactive steps to digitizing the AjA Archive collection by training our team on the technology and tools that are required to make a searchable collection. The infrastructure of the archive was created through a reflection of our own practices, which are now clearly centered for and about the community, with the permission and purposeful contribution of our participants. Our new application process invites participants to select which images, and keywords are collected, for the AjA Archive search engine.