Ordinary People Photo Project
Call for Mass Participation
In conjunction with Dona Schwartz, Ordinary People (Like Me), currently exhibited at Contemporary Calgary, we invite you to submit your work to the Ordinary People photo project. Submissions will be featured in the exhibition at Contemporary Calgary.
Members of the public can take part in this community collaboration by creating and uploading their own photo of an ordinary person, along with a sentence defining what an ordinary person is. We are keen to see and hear your ideas about what it means to be an ordinary person!
This content will be reshared to @OrdinaryPeopleYYC and it will be featured in the exhibition at Contemporary Calgary until May 22, 2022.
For more information, visit instagram.com/
How to Participate:
- Take a photo of an ordinary person.
- Complete the sentence: An ordinary person is ______________.
- Upload your photo and completed sentence to your own Instagram with #OrdinaryPeopleYYC.
Once you’ve uploaded your content to Instagram, the Ordinary People project team will select photos to re-post on the @OrdinaryPeopleYYC page.
This is a Calgary-based project, but people everywhere are welcome to take part!
About Ordinary People (Like Me)
Dona Schwartz conducts a social experiment through photographic portraiture. Initially inspired by Yoko Ono’s instruction to photograph “ordinary people,” Schwartz approached the prompt by interrogating its premise. Who do we consider ordinary? How is ordinary defined? Schwartz worked collaboratively with her subjects. She used a referral process that spawned multiple distinct lineages of portrait subjects, starting with people she’d met through daily dog walks. The resultant series maps social networks and the boundaries of everyday lived communities. The work poses questions about self-concepts, identities, and labels that simultaneously unite us and keep us apart.
