Illuminate ATL provides photography accessibility to underserved communities

June 26th, 2023

Illuminate ATL is a nonprofit organization with a mission to increase accessibility to photographic education to underserved communities. (Courtesy of Illuminate ATL)

Illuminate ATL is a nonprofit organization with a mission to increase accessibility to photography education for underserved communities in the metro Atlanta area. They believe Atlanta’s arts community should reflect its varied and distinct populations and seek to make diverse representation a reality.

Sara Keith is the Director and owner of the Atlanta School of Photography and president and co-founder of Illuminate ATL. “City Lights” producer Summer Evans spoke with Keith via Zoom about the organization.

“There’s absolutely a need for photography education in these underserved areas because you have two barriers that we were seeing…the barrier of purchasing or obtaining cameras and equipment. Photography is not a cheap hobby or creative field. Historically, one of the reasons it’s been kept from a lot of people being able to experience it is because of that threshold. But, it was also the education part of it. We could give them the cameras, but they wouldn’t know what to do with it,” said Keith.

“So we said, ‘Ok, we need to fill these two niches that we were hearing from our program partners.’ And we were already so passionate about education, and we had already done a couple of programs, just one-offs with like the Boys and Girls Club and Cool Girls. We decided to develop it into an official non-profit organization, so we launched in 2018.”