PROVINCETOWN — The sea level is rising. Sand along the coast is washing away. Surging tides flood houses. Provincetown kids know these things.
Kids from Newtok, Alaska “also know about erosion,” said Ezra Moore, who will be in eighth grade at the Provincetown Schools in the fall. The residents of Newtok lost over a mile of land to erosion and had to relocate to the newly established town of Mertarvik.
In Provincetown, an “ecosystem built on a giant sandbar,” Moore said, “the ocean is rising up closer to where we live.”
During the last school year, students in Provincetown corresponded with pen pals in Newtok. The project, created by photojournalists Emily Schiffer, who lives in Provincetown, and Kate Basile, who lives in Bethel, Alaska, connected students facing the effects of climate change.
Starting in October, after putting together funding from more than a dozen sources from both coasts and including the local school district, the Provincetown Cultural Council, and the Local Journalism Project, Schiffer taught a photojournalism class to students in Provincetown while Basile did the same with students in Alaska.
Students chose to capture varying aspects of life on the Outer Cape — all things that held meaning in relation to climate change. Ezra photographed a house raising in Provincetown. “It’s where the houses are being put up on stilts to protect them from water damage,” he says. He also sent photos he snapped of the ocean and the marshlands to his pen pal, Jonny, from Newtok. “The marshlands are one thing we have in common,” he said.
Luca Amorese, also about to start eighth grade here, was walking down to the beach to take photos on a winter day when he noticed an abandoned-looking sign. “It said ‘Art’ on it, and it was kind of messed up and falling apart,” he said of the sign on the sand behind Julie Heller Gallery. The clouds were moody, and it was snowing, so Luca decided to take a photo to show what Provincetown was like in the winter. “Nobody’s around. Everything’s closed. It’s really cool and kind of scary,” he said.
Middle years student Nora Harrington painted the maps of Provincetown and Alaska that are pasted on the title photo of the exhibition. She traced the maps onto pieces of paper and colored them with iridescent paint. “I made Cape Cod look a little more foresty and sandy,” she said. The project has given her a glimpse into the lives of the Alaska kids and a new passion for photography — which she now practices on her own time.
“I told my pen pal about my three-legged dog, Walter,” she said. “We talked about how we give him raincoats because he hates the rain and the cold.” Her pen pal was surprised, she said, because in Alaska, “Their dogs are used to the weather.”
The students put their photos and excerpts from their exchange into an exhibition titled “Lessons from Newtok,” which they first showed in June at Photoville, the photography festival in Brooklyn. There, 12 students from Provincetown and nine from Alaska met in person for the first time.
Now, the exhibition has come home and is on view through mid-September on the lawn outside the Provincetown Public Library.
Standing next to their work, several students talked about meeting their Alaska counterparts in New York. “The Alaskan kids were a little shy at first,” said rising eighth-grader Russell Avery. “And then we came together by playing basketball.” His pen pal told him about hunting moose and fishing.
“It was so cool to open up to them and for them to open up to us,” Russell said.
