LENOIR, NC.- The Youngest Parents, a traveling exhibition of documentary photographs from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will open on May 9, 2005, at the Caldwell County Arts Council's Art-in-Healing Gallery in Lenoir, North Carolina. A public reception will take place on Friday, May 20, from 5 until 7 p.m. at the Gallery, which is located at Caldwell County Memorial Hospital in Lenoir. The exhibition will run through June 30, 2005. A free documentary workshop will be held on May 21.

The Youngest Parents exhibition consists of twenty-five black-and-white photographs taken from 1986 to the present day, including follow-up photographs of the young parents, now adults, and their children, now teens and young adults themselves. The exhibit also includes text panels that allow us to read young mothers' courageously candid reflections.

Despite recent trends suggesting a reduction in the rates of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing, the United States continues to have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the industrialized world. This exhibition provides an additional means for thinking about this important reality and fosters dialogue about family relationships, sex education, and the day-to-day difficulties of the youngest parents.

John Moses, a photography instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies and a practicing pediatrician at Duke, spent eleven years documenting teenage parents in North Carolina. Jocelyn Lee, a photography professor at Princeton University, spent six years in parts of Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Nova Scotia, living and working with young mothers. Friendships of support and caring developed between the photographers and the teens, and the trust resulting from these relationships deepens the character and meaning of their work.

"In a sense I became a doctor making a kind of home visit, though my diagnostic tools were exchanged for a camera," says Moses. "No longer the confident, all-knowing doctor, I became open to new ways of thinking about the issue of adolescent pregnancy.

"As a result of my visits as a photographer, I have gained new understandings of adolescents that I believe have made me a better doctor. Having gone out to meet with them in their world, I have been provided a richer, more accurate context in which to see them, and I hope, better understand their experience."