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A photographer captures life inside Chicago Public Schools
Jael Augustin, Ogden International High School, 2019.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Melissa Ann Pinney photographed the everyday moments of adolescence inside Chicago Public Schools during a seven-year artist residency. Her series Becoming Themselves portrays students, especially those marginalized and underrepresented, as they navigate identity, community and the many transformations of growing up.
We interviewed Pinney about the making of her series and the stories behind some of her favorite images. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mila Cardenas and Alvin Truong, Senn High School, 2023.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Antonio Epps and his walking stick, Senn High School, 2025.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
What drew you to photograph inside Chicago Public Schools?
I was invited by Artists in Public Schools, an organization that pairs artists for residencies in schools all over the city, to photograph Bell School and Ogden International Schools. It was an incredible opportunity to photograph and immerse myself in often overlooked communities of children and teens in Chicago.
Since I was in my teens and photographing my own family, childhood and adolescence has been a focus of my work. Girl Ascending, my 2010 monograph, explored the social lives and coming-of-age rituals of my daughter, Emma, her friends and teammates. The possibilities inherent in widening the scope of my work beyond these established personal connections was exciting.
Asmah Mohammad Zakaria and Arshia Tahir, Senn High School, 2025.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Hireath Magee, a 2022 graduate of Ogden International High School, in Chicago, 2024.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
When you first started, what kinds of images or stories did you hope to capture?
I’m interested in photography as a process, one of paying close attention to the richness and mystery already present in the everyday world. I capture what’s happening in the moment, and the story reveals itself afterwards in contemplation of the work itself.
This is an opportunity to make what I think of as real pictures — images that reward sustained and repeated viewings and eschew stereotype and cliché. I had no idea what to expect in the schools, but through trial and error, I found opportunities to make pictures as I became part of the school community. I never know what the students will do next — their beauty, their compassion and their conflicts are unrehearsed. The teens collaborate in the art-making by welcoming me into their world.
My photographs are both documents of a time and place and works of art. References to contemporary culture, to history and to ideas of representation are all embedded in the pictures. When I began photographing students in three different Chicago public schools, I had no idea of what was to come — how the project would evolve and shift through an ongoing global pandemic, a renewed focus on systemic racial and gender inequities and rampant gun violence. Now it’s a document of a historic time.
Emilio Castelan, Senn High School, 2024.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Kevin Cooper, Senn High School, 2023.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
How much time did you spend working on Becoming Themselves?
This project is ongoing and still evolving since 2018, when I started photographing in Bell School. In Their Own Light was the first book of my early pictures from an elementary, middle and several high schools. In Becoming Themselves, I focus solely on two high schools — Ogden International High School and Senn High School — between 2019 and 2025.
Halloween, Senn High School, 2023.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Khadijatou Sohna and Alyanna Manibo, Senn High School, 2024.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
What was the most challenging part of this project?
It is very hard to witness the grief and ongoing trauma many students experience as part of their everyday lives, especially when we hear that a student in the community has been shot and killed. Tragically, eight students I photographed died that way. The trauma of gun violence reverberates everywhere.
A flag football team, Senn High School, 2024.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Homecoming pep rally, Senn High School, 2022.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Lizzie Williams, Senn High School, 2021.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
What’s the story behind one of your favorite photographs?
With her My Little Pony leggings and arms loaded with jewelry, Lizzie Williams clearly stood out in the hallway crowded with students at their lockers gathering their coats and bags. I introduced myself and asked if Lizzie wanted to make a portrait. We went to the old gym for its brilliant light and huge south-facing windows. In the midst of working out Lizzie’s pose and position, the boys basketball team starting running laps around the gym, casting shadows onto the wall where Lizzie stood. At first I was annoyed by this unexpected disruption, but I soon realized that, far from an unwelcome distraction, the shadows suggest another level of mystery and complexity. I’m grateful for serendipity!
The DePaul University Art Museum added this photograph and six others from the project to their permanent collection last spring. A class of Senn students, many of whom are represented in the photographs, took a field trip to the museum to see the works.
Jae Nguyen, Sal Vega and Audrey Harmon, Senn High School, 2025.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Kho’vya Greenwood and her brother, Coby, at Kho’vya’s prom send-off celebration, Chicago, 2022.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Were there any moments that surprised you during the process?
Many moments surprised me.
One day early last fall, a student I hadn’t met before asked me to take his picture. I was happy to do so and we found a place by the windows with some light. When I looked through my lens, I suddenly recognized Axle, a student I’d first met two years before, when he transferred to Senn. I had photographed him several other times. Axle had transformed himself radically with a new short hair cut and different style of dress.
I am always surprised and moved when a student tells me that the project made a positive impact on their life. Travion Williams, at Ogden International High School, said he was shy, self-conscious and unsure of himself when we made his portrait in 2019. Travion’s portrait was one of the 84 portraits installed on panels in the school’s front lobby in the summer of 2020. Classes would be completely online that fall, but outdoor sports were still allowed. When the cross country team started practicing, Travion discovered that his friends and teammates recognized and admired him. It changed the way he saw himself.
It’s rewarding when I’m told by a student that my work is important to them. As my ties to the community have deepened — I’ve come to understand the meaning this project holds for me and for the students themselves, who tell me they feel truly “seen” by participating in the project. The students have profoundly affected the ways I understand the lives of others; my relationships now transcend school to include family events, parties and baby showers. I couldn’t have predicted the strong connections I would develop with some of the students, who keep in touch even years after they’ve graduated.
When I brought Sophiat Agboola a print of her portrait, she told me it was inspiring. Surprised, I asked in what way it was inspiring and to whom — I couldn’t guess. Sophiat said she had occasionally been made fun of for wearing her natural hair; her portrait had given her the confidence to do so.
Of course, the pandemic surprised me. And the fact that a project I expected to last one year could still be challenging and rewarding after seven was a complete surprise, too.
Jo Gonda and Andrew McDermott at prom, Senn High School, 2024.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Jakolbi Lard, at prom, Ogden International High School, 2019. Lard was shot and killed in Chicago in January 2022.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Do you have any memorable anecdotes or encounters from your time in the schools ?
I photographed Jakolbi Lard only once, at prom in 2019, drawn by the broken heart he had shaved in to his hair. In January 2022, I learned that Jakolbi had been shot and killed. Jakolbi’s death and the passage of time bring a different perspective to the broken heart shaved into his scalp. Now I see the wings formed by the mirror frame behind Jakolbi’s back. Jakolbi’s mother, Patricia Lard, told me that rather than being heartbroken, he was the heart-breaker. She brought Jakolbi’s daughter, Jamyah, to an exhibition that included Jakolbi’s portrait in 2023. She believes that exhibiting Jakolbi’s portrait honors his life. Ms. Lard thanked me for “… seeing in her Sun (sic) what the world did not.”
Shamaiya Mitchell and Stephon Wright, Senn High School, 2023.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
The last day of school for the class of 2025, Senn High School, 2025.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
Has working in schools changed how you think about education or childhood?
The students have a lot more agency than kids in my generation or even my daughter’s generation did. These students are free to define themselves through their chosen teams and clubs, their dress, sexual orientation, pronouns and sometimes taking on a new name. There’s a freedom in the acceptance and allowance for difference I see and a closeness in the physical camaraderie between many of the students.
I started reading the news more closely when I began this project. CPS (Chicago Public Schools) and the CTU (the Chicago Teachers Union) are frequently in the headlines. It’s clear that Chicago’s past is linked to its present by a history of events affecting the city in housing, education, racial and gender equity and immigration. All of these issues flow through the permeable wall between the city and the public schools.
DeJa Rae Reaves, a 2022 graduate of Ogden International High School. Reaves was shot and killed in April 2023, her freshman year at North Carolina A&T.
Melissa Ann Pinney
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Melissa Ann Pinney
What do you hope viewers take away from seeing these images?
I hope these pictures encourage a deeper consideration and appreciation of the radiant young people in our public schools that goes far beyond the stereotypes. I intend these portraits to honor and commemorate those who are vulnerable and often underrepresented.
Melissa Ann Pinney is an artist based in Chicago. You can see more of her work on her website, MelissaAnnPinney.com, or on Instagram, at @melissa_ann_pinney.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
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Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
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