DVD 3: "Face Forward", February 2006

Film about African American students at Wesleyan by Jane Charles-Voltaire '2007 and Simone L. Collins '2007. Face Forward is a short photo essay that explores Black identity and community at Wesleyan. It was designed to start a conversation about community and what it really means to be a Black community. Too often, the term community can be restrictive an at Wesleyan, there often is a sense of disjointed ness within the Black community. The central issue was that while individuals identified themselves as being Black, that didn't necessarily mean that they were the same. So, in many ways, the focus of this project was to show the many faces of Blackness and how we all fit together at Wesleyan. Methodology: To better understand our own Black community, specifically who we are an where we came from, we chose to interview and photograph approximately 50 Wesleyan students, each of whom identifies as Black. These students represented a multitude of backgrounds, nationalities, interests, and majors. We sought to understand their Black identity as relative to others but perhaps also figure out how each of these unique identities could come together to form a new understanding of Blackness and ultimately, a community. We also wanted to consider the fact that we are all part of a much larger Wesleyan community and visually reference the legacy we have been left with from previous generations of Black students. The historical photographs are of Wesleyan students in the 1960s and 1970s.