Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who studies the way children grow up in a variety of social and cultural situations.

Coles has studied school desegregation, the children of migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers, and the effects of school busing on children. More recently, he has examined the manner in which racial, religious, social, and ideological conflicts shape the moral and political thinking of children. His work has taken him to rural and urban locales in South and North America, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Nicaragua, and Poland. Coles’ books include the five-volume Children of Crisis (1967-78), The Moral Life of Children (1986), The Political Life of Children (1986), The Spiritual Life of Children (1990), and The Moral Intelligence of Children: How to Raise a Moral Child (1996), The Secular Mind (2001), and Children of Crisis (2003).

ABOUT ALEX HARRIS

For over forty years, Alex Harris has photographed across the American South, and in locations as disparate as the Inuit villages of Alaska, the streets of Havana, the fish markets of Mumbai, and the Hispanic settlements of northern New Mexico. Now Harris has selected photographs – some well-known and others that haven’t been widely seen – that are especially meaningful to him from across his body of work. In this exhibit, Harris also explores the various ways he’s approached and thought about the idea of distance as a photographer.