Picturing the College Student-Mother Experience: The First Installment of a New Collaboration with Getty Images
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In honor of Mother’s Day 2020, the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation (SHSF) is proud to release the first installment of its new five-part collaboration with Getty Images: The New College Majority Photo Series. This collaboration highlights the changed, and often underrepresented, demographics of today’s college students. The first installment of 217 images in this series spotlights mothers who are attending college. Currently, 22% of college students are also parents [IWPR]; nearly one in 10 college students is a single mother [IWPR].
Abigail Seldin, CEO of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation said, “Visual representation breathes life into statistics. These hundreds of new images of mothers in college illustrate a set of experiences currently shared by 3.8 million postsecondary students. Strong visuals depicting the reality and resilience of today’s student mothers can help create conditions of accessibility, on campus and in our communities. At the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation, parenting students remain a priority and we will continue to work for childcare and benefits access to improve upon their educational outcomes. It is our hope to see images from the New College Majority Photo Series utilized heavily in media, advocacy, and public policy work.”
“At a time when imagery is the most widely spoken global language, it has never been more important to produce and promote visuals that are all at once progressive and inclusive—especially given imagery’s power to significantly impact how people both think and act,” said Katie Calhoun, Vice-President of Sales for Getty Images. “We were thrilled to collaborate with the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation team to help them further their mission, dreaming up and delivering custom creative content which more accurately speaks to the incredible communities they’re working to serve, support and encourage.”
The 217 new images of mothers in college are available for licensing and download on Getty Images and iStock through dedicated links, and a subset of 25 images is featured on the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation website.
About Getty Images: Guided by the belief that imagery can change the world, Getty Images, a global leader in visual communications, has worked with various organizations over the last decade to create creative content which authentically represents the world around us. From collaborations with LeanIn.org to Dove, Verizon Media to AARP, as well as others, Getty Images has sought to re-picture entire communities, many of which have been plagued by either stereotypical imagery or simply a lack of visual representation.
About the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation: Established by Abigail Seldin and Whitney Haring-Smith in 2019, the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation funds seed stage public interest projects and collaborates with leading technology companies to build self-sustaining tools for the new college majority. In 2020, SHSF launched SwiftStudent, a free digital tool that provides financial aid appeal guidance and letter templates for students, with the cloud-based software company FormSwift and a coalition of 18 leading higher education organizations. SHSF’s partnership with Getty Images, “New College Majority,” is generating hundreds of stock new images highlighting adult students, students struggling with basic needs, students with debt, and parenting students. SHSF also makes external grants and operates and interdisciplinary research fellows program.
