Sixteen

What’s it like to be sixteen years old now?

In this major touring exhibition leading contemporary photographers join forces with more than one hundred and seventy sixteen-year-olds across the UK to explore their dreams, hopes and fears and who and what they care about.

Photographer Craig Easton conceived this ambitious project in collaboration with sixteen-year-olds at the time of the Scottish independence referendum. It was the first, and as yet only time in in the United Kingdom sixteen-year-olds have been given the vote. Building on the success of this work he invited some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographers to collaborate with him and young people to create visual vox pops on what it means to be sixteen now.

Photographers Robert C Brady, Linda Brownlee, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Christopher Nunn, Kate Peters, Simon Roberts, Michelle Sank, and Abbie Trayler-Smith joined Craig Easton to develop and produce Sixteen. Working with photography, film, social media, audio recordings and writing, they brought together the faces and testimonies of young people from diverse communities across the UK, giving prominence to voices rarely heard.

Sixteen spring touring programme

Hull Central Library celebrates the first touring exhibition in its new gallery space. Jillian Edelstein’s suite of stunning portraits, made in collaboration with the Hull Warren Youth Project and Wilberforce College students, was shot in a pop-up classroom studio. Each sixteen-year-old included the title of a favourite song in their testimony as another way of telling their story. Photographic, FaceTime and video portraits of young people in areas reaching from the Scottish Islands and Cornwall and shown in the Library with their Hull contemporaries, as an integral part of the Sixteenproject.