What’s it like to be sixteen years old now? In this major touring exhibition, leading contemporary photographers join forces with more than one hundred and seventy sixteen-year-olds across the UK to explore their dreams, hopes and fears and who and what they care about.
Thanks to additional Arts Council England funding Sixteen begins an extended spring touring programme, which includes the Williamson Art Gallery as a partner.
Photographer Craig Easton conceived this ambitious project in collaboration with sixteen-year-olds at the time of the Scottish independence referendum.
It was the first, and as yet only time in in the United Kingdom sixteen-year-olds have been given the vote. Building on the success of this work, he invited some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographers to collaborate with him and young people to create visual vox pops on what it means to be sixteen now.
Photographers Robert C Brady, Linda Brownlee, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Christopher Nunn, Kate Peters, Simon Roberts, Michelle Sank, and Abbie Trayler-Smith joined Craig Easton to develop and produce Sixteen. Working with photography, film, social media, audio recordings and writing, they brought together the faces and testimonies of young people from diverse communities across the UK, giving prominence to voices rarely heard.
New partnerships in Hull, Shetland, Wirral, and Widnes follow acclaimed exhibitions earlier this year across Greater Manchester, and at Format International Photography Festival in Derby. Both the Wirral and Widnes exhibitions offer a foretaste of the compelling work that launches Sixteen’s summer programme across the Liverpool City Region at the end of July.