"It's pretty intense," Fithian said of her dual majors in fine arts and social work. "But I don't know if I would want it any other way." Fithian is a junior on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and recently participated in her first official gallery show of her photography at the SoFa Gallery at the Fine Arts Building. She had six photographs in the show, which featured shoreline scenes along Lake Michigan. "That was my first exposure to put up work for people to come and look at. It was really great," Fithian said of the experience of seeing her photographs matted, framed and with her name on the wall. Fithian started out in the fine arts program at Bloomington. She had always enjoyed taking pictures, but a class on photography in high school led her to see the differences between photography as an interesting hobby and photography as an art form. So when she entered IU, she decided to follow her interest in photography. But she couldn't shake a sense that "something was missing." Then she happened to take an introductory class about social work from Carleen Quinn, the Coordinator of Field Instruction for the social work program in Bloomington. The class made her realize social work was the answer to fulfilling another one of her goals - helping people. Her interest in helping people stretches back to her first involvement with CISV when she was 11. The organization, formerly called Children's International Summer Villages, is a nonprofit, nonpolitical group that promotes youth education through cross-cultural education at summer camps held around the world. Her first venture with the group took her to Brazil for a month. Ten countries were represented at the summer camp, each made up of four children and a team leader. The whole idea behind the organization is to have these camps and have people learn to live with one another despite differences such as language, religion and how they were raised. "The most fascinating part is just realizing people are basically the same all around the world." To this day Fithian says when she looks at a map and sees Australia, she doesn't see the country, but her friend Lizzie whom she met at a camp. The same is true of Brazil where she can easily pictures the faces of friends she has made there. Her study in fine arts coupled with her interest in social work has led Fithian to realize her interest in photography could assist her interest in helping people. While photography is appealing, Fithian understood she needed some other background if she was to realize her hopes of helping people through some kind of social documentary photography. Her studies in photography can also help her advance causes she might take up as a social worker. Whether she uses photography in documentary photography, which is essentially documenting something for the sake of documenting it, or whether she engages in social documentary photography, which is documenting something to bring about change, photography can be an important tool. "Photography is a powerful medium for that," she said of getting peoples attention to a problem they might not otherwise have heard or read about. Whatever the future brings, Fithian seems pretty certain about one thing: "I think I am always going to be taking photographs no matter what I am doing or where I am at."
Leah Fithian with her Gallery photos
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