The United Nations predicts that by 2050 in parts of the world 84% of the population will live in urban centers.VCU is lucky; it is an urban university, situated in a rapidly changing urban environment. Because of this, our students interact closely with the city they inhabit.

This spring, 2012, our students have decided to adopt JR’s Inside Out Project, and to bring a version of this to campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. This winter we began photographing Richmond residents, and we’ve been posting the images at a flickr site set up for this project.

We hope to install the images around the city temporarily and then make them available to interested participants as permanent portraits for their home or workspace at the conclusion of our project. It’s our hope that a few images might be preserved to remain on campus as part of the special collections archives or the art we include in campus buildings.

Questions of civic engagement are central to VCU’s and the University College’s core goals. We hope this project might in part help us to see not two communities, the university and its surrounding neighborhoods, but one community that inhabits both.

See Richmond's portraits at our flickr page.

Read more about our project.

Visit the Inside Out Project to submit your own portrait.

See our Official Inside Out page.

Email us at insideoutrva at gmail dot com.