Justice Forward Virginia x The Self Portrait Project

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA – The Self Portrait Project traveled from New York City to collaborate with Justice Forward Virginia on July 22, 2023. The “photo booth” installation was part of Network NOVA’s annual Women’s Summit–a three day event that brings together grassroots activists, organizations, elected officials, and candidates. Created by National Geographic Traveler award-winning photographer Andy Lin, The Self-Portrait Project is a system and method for self-representation using a patented two-way mirror, camera, and remote control–The Project itself is an exploration of shared humanity.

Since 2009,The Self Portrait Project has been reconceptualizing the photo booth using a principle of agency over one’s image as its core tenet. In the process, it has enabled tens of thousands of participants in over 1,000 unique locations in seven countries to tell their own visual stories. Using the resulting archive of over 1,000,000 images. The Project asks viewers to acknowledge their similarities even while celebrating their differences.

Supported by Lin’s work as co-founder of the non-profit organization Other Worlds, the project’s philosophical and spiritual beginnings reside in alternative economies from around the world, such as the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, worker-controlled factories in Argentina, a traditional gift economy in Mali, and the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico.

The Self Portrait Project has explored and documented the idea of subjectivity at a time where self-authorship is more prevalent than ever before. The Project integrates into the spaces and moments which attract the culturally curious to spark visually driven conversations. The participatory nature of it provides the unique ability to be curated as an exhibition while inviting the viewer to contribute to an ever-growing body of work: a discourse on the notion of empowerment and a look into the spirit of our time. 

In collaboration with Justice Forward Virginia, The Self Portrait Project was used as a powerful medium to represent what it looks like when collective, progressive values come together to organize for a better world. The resulting gallery provides a glimpse into the power of representation, grassroots advocacy, political engagement, and civic participation. Justice Forward Virginia.

Andy Lin is a National Geographic Traveler award-winning photographer who is the creator and creative director of The Self-Portrait Project – a visual art + archive endeavor which since 2009 has utilized a two-way mirror and remote control to empower people in the creation of their own images. He is a co-founder of Other Worlds, a multi-media non-profit that sought to document and disseminate cases of alternative economies around the world. In 2007 he traveled to West Africa to start "Mali Multi-Media", which taught school children in impoverished communities the art of photography.