Lynn Renee Persin & Edison Regional Gifted Center
Project Overview
Being an eight year old is such a unique time in a child’s life, they are mature enough to put complete ideas together but young enough to believe that anything is possible. This was the inspiration I used for this portrait project for the second grade at Edison Regional Gifted Center in the Albany Park neighborhood in Chicago.
My goal was to create portraits that could serve as a time capsule, telling us who they are, what they love, and what they believe in by using their own words in their own handwriting.
Working with their second grade teacher and their art teacher, we put together a writing prompt for them to answer, “what is your favorite thing about yourself and how can you share it with the world?” While they filled out the their answers, I photographed each of them in the hallway by the art class and we discussed the prompts during their portrait sessions. I put a chair down so that they would sit relatively still; they are definitely at that age where their bodies want to move all the time. The chair is positioned sideways to allow each student another voice in this project, a choice in how they sat down and interacted with my camera and me.
While photographing one student the rest were in the art room filling out their answers, which I scanned and placed into the selected portraits. Now viewers can get to know these students on many different levels; they can see how they look, see how they dress, how they sit, read what they wrote, and see their handwriting exactly how it looked on February 5, 2020.
—Lynn Renee Persin
Meet the Artist
Lynn Renee Persin
Portrait by Abbi Chase
Having studied photography at the University of Michigan, Lynn Renee Persin has been a part of the Chicago photographic community for over 20 years. Her work has been exhibited at the now defunct Around the Coyote festivals in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood where she picked up a curator’s choice award from Tricia Van Eck, then the associate curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition she was a chosen artist for The Artist Project, an exhibition that accompanied Chicago’s Art Expo in the Merchandise Mart.
Currently Lynn supports her family in her chosen career of photography, partnering with local non-profits to provide event and marketing photography. Her work is often featured on billboards and bus stops throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, and she spends her evenings photographing fundraisers, her daytimes photographing school programs, and in the summer you can find her up at summer camp hanging out of a canoe with two camera bodies strapped to her chest. And in her free time you can often find her setting up a picnic in the park with her husband, 8 year old son, and her dog named, “Sox.”
https://www.lynnreneephoto.com/index
Visit their Website
Having studied photography at the University of Michigan, Lynn Renee Persin has been a part of the Chicago photographic community for over 20 years. Her work has been exhibited at the now defunct Around the Coyote festivals in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood where she picked up a curator’s choice award from Tricia Van Eck, then the associate curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition she was a chosen artist for The Artist Project, an exhibition that accompanied Chicago’s Art Expo in the Merchandise Mart.
Currently Lynn supports her family in her chosen career of photography, partnering with local non-profits to provide event and marketing photography. Her work is often featured on billboards and bus stops throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, and she spends her evenings photographing fundraisers, her daytimes photographing school programs, and in the summer you can find her up at summer camp hanging out of a canoe with two camera bodies strapped to her chest. And in her free time you can often find her setting up a picnic in the park with her husband, 8 year old son, and her dog named, “Sox.”
https://www.lynnreneephoto.com/index
Visit their Website
Portrait by Abbi Chase
