Help fund photobook about young people
Aperture Foundation has launched its third Kickstarter campaign to support My Last Day at Seventeen, a photobook by Doug DuBois about an exceptional group of young people from a housing estate in Ireland, to be published in September 2015.
Support of this Kickstarter project will make the publication of the book possible, and allow Aperture to publish a special community edition for the subjects in DuBois' photographs - a way to give back to the community in which this work was made.
Doug DuBois first went to Ireland at the invitation of Sirius Arts Centre in Cork in 2009. What began as a month-long residency grew into a five-year project about youth, Ireland, and an exceptional group of young people from a few blocks of a housing estate in Russell Heights. The resulting photographs are an exploration into the promise and adventure of childhood with an eye toward its fragility and inevitable loss.
DuBois gained entry to the community when two of its residents, Kevin and Eirn (who would later become central subjects of his work), took him to a local hangout spot, opening his eyes ³to a world of the not-quite adults, struggling‹publicly and privately‹through the last moments of their childhood.²
Over the course of many summers, DuBois returned to Russell Heights. People came and left, relationships formed and dissolved, and babies were born. Combining portraits, spontaneous encounters, and collaborative performances, the images of My Last Day at Seventeen exist in a delicate balance between documentary and fiction
If this Kickstarter campaign is successful, in fall 2015, the New York-based not-for-profit photography publisher Aperture Foundation will publish the photobook My Last Day at Seventeen. The book incorporates elements of a graphic novel, with stories from the community illustrated by Patrick Lynch.
Along with the photobook, Aperture Foundation hopes to also publish a unique community edition, produced especially for the individuals featured in the book, as a way to acknowledge the individual value of members in the community and their integral roles in the making of the project.
Doug DuBois (born in Dearborn, Michigan, 1960) received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked as a photographer since the mid 1980s, combining a documentary style with carefully constructed and collaborative scenes. DuBois is best known for his first monograph All the Days and Nights (Aperture, 2009)‹a twenty-five year project examining the complex realm of family. He has photographed for magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Details, and GQ. Doug teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aperturefoundation/my-last-day-at-seventeen-by-doug-dubois