When our stories are seen and heard, we discover our common bonds.
About #YourTurn
#YourTurn asks participants to use the past and present as touchstones in the creation of photography collaborations. Designed to encourage engagement across borders both internal and external, #YourTurn features work by teenage students, photo-educators and working artists from Los Angeles and beyond.
Through #YourTurn projects, Students, Photo Educators and Communities come together to curate their own messages and broadcast them in a way that is inclusive, collaborative and representative; moving away from a single image representing a single voice to that of a collective voice, co-creating, co-narrating and co-curating their own photo stories.
Current Project
This year’s #YourTurn Photography theme, Beginnings and Voyages, invites students to focus on process, curiosity, and exploration. Rooted in the idea that the journey is more interesting than the destination, students will use analog and digital photography to capture moments of growth, discovery, and change in their teenage lives.
Through experimentation in the darkroom and Photoshop, students will create personal stories about Los Angeles and community, recognizing that life—and art—is built from small, meaningful moments along the way.
The work of our guest artists exemplifies the use of personal narrative to create images that speak to the viewer and convey complex personal stories and feelings.
Mackenzie Calle . Mackenzie Calle (she/her) is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. She is focused on long-term stories that creatively investigate science, space and queer issues. Her project, The Gay Space Agency, is the recipient of the 2024 World Press Photo in Open Format for North and Central America. She is also a Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellow and was a finalist for the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards. Calle is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and ICP’s Documentary Practice & Visual Journalism program.
Our second guest artist is Genesis Baez. She is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Centering photography, Báez merges fiction, personal narratives, and social histories of modern de/colonization in a conversation around placemaking. Her works foreground the material qualities of photography, such as relative stasis, edges, and light, and how they come to reveal the interconnections that underpin our lives. Her recent monograph, Blue Sun (Capricious Publishing, 2025), weaves a decade of photographs made in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Aperture Paris-Photo First PhotoBook award, and included in the top 10 photo books of 2025 list by Smithsonian Magazine.
Báez was raised in New England and Puerto Rico. She received her BFA with honors from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She currently teaches at Princeton University, and is a forthcoming Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College.
Visual symbols tell the world who we are, what inspires us, and where we have been. Publicly Private will provide the inspiration and platform for teens to tell stories about their inner selves and communities. See works In-Progress Below
The following photographs are by Harvard Westlake Students inspired by Genesis Baez and Mackenzie Calle.
Is it #YourTurn? Join us!
We are looking for student, educator, and working artist collaborators from across the country. If you would like to be a part of the #YourTurn Project, please fill out the form that best suits your role as a contributor and one of our project organizers will reach out!