By Fabiola Joubert
Senior Noelle Smith remembered the night she pulled into the Annapolis gas station where her friend Zeus worked. Just days into her senior year, she was contemplating the subject for her thesis project. Zeus proposed an idea.
“Why don’t you just follow me around with your camera?” he said. Ms. Smith snickered at first. But he wasn’t kidding.
“I’ve got an interesting life,” he told her.
What began as banter at the gas station became a photographic journey that has changed Ms. Smith's life. Zeus invited her to the small Section 8 apartment his girlfriend, Mira, shares with her mother and their two children. For the past six months, Ms. Smith's camera documented the couple and their children, six-month-old daughter, Kimari, and newborn son, Marlin.
She has captured the arch of their relationship from their struggles with poverty to the strains of parenthood and the dangers and temptations of their urban streets. The result is a photojournalism tour de force called “Threshold,” a starkly intimate portrait of a family navigating life in one of the poorest sections of Annapolis. Threshold will be on display at the NEXT 2015 Corcoran School Thesis Exhibition from April 8 to May 17.
Read more at Unveiled.