SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA.- Throughout her career, documentarian and street photographer Amy Touchette has utilized the power of photography to create authentic portraits of people within their social groups and communities. In 2012, The New York Times published images from New York Young, Touchette's street portrait series of teenagers in New York City. The newspaper described the work as "a potent mix of street savvy and aching vulnerability ..." New York Young inspired Touchette to make the same style of portraits of teenagers in O'ahu, Hawaii and Tokyo, Japan to discover what teen culture looks like in three disparate island nations.

She writes: "Before travel became so ubiquitous, island populations were more sequestered ... their culture would reflect that isolation in that it felt more unified and unique than landlocked settings. Although the world is globalized now, significant remnants of each island culture still exist. I thought that because these three locations had strong and distinct personalities, it would create a more heightened and interesting visual experience."

A solo exhibition of Touchette's three bodies of work focusing on teens, entitled The Young Series, will be on view at the California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo Gallery from February 22 to March 16, 2018. The work will be displayed in different groupings to invite viewers to actively engage with the photographs, discovering differences and similarities in the postures, fashion, relationships, behaviors, and attitudes of young people from different cultures, ethnicities, and geographic parts of the world.

Accompanying the main exhibition will be an Instagram feed of Touchette's series, Street Dailies, a collection of quintessential New York characters that reveal Touchette's appreciation for the communities and everyday lives of her subjects. The series will be displayed on a 60" diagonal touch screen HD television in the gallery space.

Trained at the International Center of Photography, Touchette began her artistic career as a writer and painter, earning a BA in Literature and Studio Art and an MA in Literature. Her first monograph, Shoot the Arrow: A Portrait of The World Famous *BOB*, was published and funded by Un-Gyve Press (Boston, 2013). Other publications include The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Esquire magazine, Russia. Her photographs have exhibited nationally and internationally, including MoMA-Moscow, Leica Gallery-Warszawa, Hamburg Triennial of Photography, and in the US embassies in Vienna, Austria, and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. She has given artist lectures at UCLA Extension, B&H Superstore, School of Visual Arts, the School of the International Center of Photography, among other institutions. Touchette also works as a freelance photography writer for publications, including PDN, Rangefinder, and Emerging Photographer, and writes an ongoing series about street photography for Envato Tuts+. She is represented by ClampArt in New York City.