Melissa Ann Pinney

fine-art photography

My series, Signals & Mysteries: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools celebrates students amid the formidable challenges of our day, and honors the future they are striving to create. This project is grounded in topical events and the students are my focus. It’s about the teens, their relationships and their emerging identities.

I never know what the students will do next; their beauty, their compassion & their conflicts are unrehearsed. The teens collaborate in the art work by allowing me into their fierce & fragile world, a world, as James Agee wrote, which “brings to the surface it’s own signals and mysteries.”