The Girl Project is cool; we need more things like this.  Basically it’s a collection of photographs taken by American adolescent girls, often of themselves and their friends, but also various aspects of their environment.  Media has become such an important part of kids’ lives, both consuming it and producing it.  Every child with a cell phone now has the capacity to visually document their experiences, including creating photos of experiences that have landed them in legal hot water. The sexting phenomenon, while technically outside the parameters of this blog, does demonstrate a vital truth that I’ve touched upon before in this blog: kids are sexual beings. But I digress. The Girl Project demonstrates another vital truth that the media and society tend to ignore: kids are also extremely creative beings. Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” My point here is that kids don’t get nearly enough respect or acknowledgement for the positive things they do and the media presents a distorted view of them.  One of the ways we could remedy that is by setting up more things like the Girl Project.  No pics posted here; I want you to go to the site linked above, and the accompanying blog.

[Editor’s note: the project has ended, its website and blog have been removed.]