The Middle Street Gallery

Paula Endo

A documentary and fine art photographer, Paula Endo earned her B.A. at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA, California and an M.A.T. in fine arts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years, teaching at the high school and college level.

WIth funding from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from state humanities and local artist's grants, Paula Endo has exhibited major documentary photo projects regionally, nationally, and in Egypt and China. In 1996 she founded and directed an afternoon photography and service program and worked with teenagers in a largely immigrant and refugee community in Arlington. With N.E.A. funding, support from Arlington County and sponsorship of the non-profit Urban Alternatives Foundation, her students documented the community and had their work exhibited at the Smithsonian and also had their work published in an art-quality book entitled "Portraits from the Pike: A Celebration of Community".

Currently a coordinator of a major documentary project in Arlington called the Columbia Pike Documentary Project, Paula Endo works with a team of photographers, a historian, and oral history consultants to document dramatic socio-cultural changes that have taken place along and near a main street in Arlington as it transitioned from a mainly white to one of the most diverse areas in Northern Virginia. Their work is on display in a neighborhood branch library in Arlington.

"Though most of my serious work has been documentary in nature, I have always been making pictures that didn't fit any category except what can be called "personal vision" - photography for me is a lens looking both outward and inward. It is a means of exploring and connecting with the world with my inner eyes open. I find my photographic imagery and mode of operating express a tension between introspection and documentation, between inner reflection and outer service - and sometimes encompass both tendencies at once."

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