Youth Portraits
Youth Portraits is an educational
program in which five young people who had served time on Rikers Island worked
side by side with Sound Portraits producers to create short documentaries
about their lives. Youth
Portraits has its own Web site, which has excerpts of the pieces, photographs,
and more information about the program: http://youthportraits.org.
Ghetto Life Study Guide
In 1993, Sound Portraits
gave LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, two fourteen-year-old boys in Chicago's
Ida B. Wells housing projects, tape recorders and microphones to document
their lives. They spent a week interviewing their families and friends and
recording themselves as they went through their day. The resulting documentary,
Ghetto Life 101, was the first
program crafted in this style to air on NPR. Ghetto Life 101 (along
with the follow-up documentary, Remorse)
won a Peabody Award, broadcast journalism's most prestigious award, and was
turned into the acclaimed book Our
America.
After the release of Ghetto
Life 101, Sound Portraits received hundreds of letters from teachers and
students who wanted to learn how to make their own audio portrait. In response,
Sound Portraits collaborated with Facing History
and Ourselves, an education outreach organization, to create a Ghetto
Life 101 study guide. You can download
a PDF file of the study guide, or contact Facing History and Ourselves
for more information by calling them at (617) 232-1595.
![[Skip nav]](/images/clearpixel.gif){kind=tracking}
