For the third year in a row, we are exhibiting in Photoville: New York City’s free, premier photo destination, produced by United Photo Industries. This year our installation is titled Water is a Women’s Issue; a national collaborative project organized by the Lower Eastside Girls Club, which examines how water impacts women’s bodies, our home communities, and our daily life.

Our sister organizations: Las Fotos Project (Los Angeles), Club Balam / Stsebetik Bolom (Chiapas, Mexico), A VOICE (Flathead Nation, Montana) and YAYAs (New Orleans), are all exploring the struggles around water in their respective backyards. The girls are designing their own visual, ethnographic photography projects to capture the emergent crises pertaining to extreme water scarcity, abundance, pollution, and contamination.

Water is a Woman’s Issue examines how water can impact women in our homes and in our communities, and the strategies that may help protect us.

We have been exploring the concerns about water in our respective backyards so that we can: define a visual, ethnographic photography project to capture this emergent crisis, and to portray the impact of the scarcity–or abundance, and the pollution of water, within the daily life of our communities, and in our families.

This work also documents other projects of hope: scientists and engineers racing against time for solutions, environmental activists are planting trees, cleaning stream beds and shorelines, politicians and citizens are sounding alarms and creating new and equitable laws, and most importantly: youth groups are working to change the course of the future.

After all, it is the younger generation leading the climate action movement, organizing to highlight the crisis, fighting for equitable access to natural resources–including water, and struggling for a viable and sustainable planet for our future. We are wielding our cameras, and telling our stories from diverse corners of the world–we are answering the call to action.

PHOTOVILLE is New York City’s FREE premier photo destination. Produced by United Photo Industries, the annual free outdoor photo festival is a modular venue built from re-purposed shipping containers.

By creating a physical platform for photographers of all stripes to come together and interact, Photoville provides a unique opportunity to engage with a diverse audience — a veritable cross-section of the world’s photographic community.

Photoville’s eighth edition will take place in September 2019 in Brooklyn Bridge Plaza and feature more than 90 indoor and outdoor exhibitions, as well as 30+ panels, workshops, night time projections and more!