Amanda van Scoyoc

I have struggled with the act of being a photographer in a large community center where not everyone knows who I am and why I always have a camera. Roca has received consent to be photographed from all of their young people, so I can take photos of anyone in Roca to be used in Roca – based publications. I try to take photos only of the people who know me, but I have a hard time sticking to that rule.

The photos I take relate to Roca’s key groups of young people. I take pictures that show pregnant teenagers, young mothers, young fathers, young men working, and undocumented youth. They have all already given consent to be photographed at Roca, but is it right to photograph knowing that the photographs will label them as being a part of one of the above groups? I worry that capturing them while they are making a first effort to change their lives isn’t fair.

The issue of consent is very different with the young mothers that I work with. The photos I take of them and the audio interviews I have done with them are much more intimate. In many cases I am asking young women to talk and write openly about sex and relationships. The first couple of months I worked with them I was stressed about making sure I got their consent, but I felt that giving them a paper to sign would send the wrong message when I was simultaneously telling them that their journals were their own personal spaces.

In the past few weeks, I have finally gotten to know the girls well enough that they understand me better, which has made the issue of consent much less of an issue. They now know all about the Hine Fellowship. They have asked me questions like why I don’t have kids, why I live in Somerville, how much I get paid, and why I am working on the issue of teen pregnancy. I have tried my best to answer all of these questions. I have shown them previous work about teen pregnancy and tried to explain that I think it is important that their voices are heard because their stories differ from the public perception of teenage pregnancy. I can’t say they always react with the enthusiasm I hope for.

Last week I played them a Radio Diaries piece on teen pregnancy. I had hoped to discuss how Joe Richmond chose the worst case senario (the girl grew up in foster care, parties all the time, has no relationship with her parents, has an STD). I wanted them to understand that the stories that the public hears about teen pregnancy are often skewed to be the flashiest cases and are not their own. Instead they got very caught up in discussing how much the girl in the interview was partying and how they never get to party because they have kids.

One of the privileges of the Hine Fellowship is that I have the time to be in constant contact with the people whose lives I am documenting. I have the time to show them the work in progress and thus I am never working on something without their knowledge. If you know the participants well enough and you have a clear idea of what you are doing with the material and you keep your participants informed throughout the process there should not be any conflict or need for consent. In reality, I understand that with the limits on time, and changes that happen along the way, this idealism is not always possible. For this reason I do expect in the end to have each girl fill out a consent form. But, I want to make sure that before they sign, they understand exactly what will happen with their work. I want to take the time to go over their work and my work. In particular, I want to go over their journal scans with them to choose together the parts of their work that they give me consent to use.

I think the thing that has affected both my access to these girls’ lives as well as their willingness to display their work is the fact that I have grown to like them and it shows. They know me well enough that they know that I want to tell their stories, not my interpretation of teen pregnancy or the flashiest story. In the end I think of the act of giving consent as an act of trust You are granting your words to another, trusting that they will not use them to harm you in any way. I’m glad that I have taken the time to know these women before asking them to have such faith in me.