YOUR STORY: Looking Forward - their goals and dreams is a collection of retrospective images and statements of a group of teenagers who started their life journey together in preschool.

The first set of images were part of a photographic essay captured and exhibited in 2000 titled The Day in the Life of a Pre-schooler.

My youngest son Dominic was the initial focus of the project.

Throughout the year, I drove my son to preschool and spent the morning session with him playing with puzzles and other activities and came upon the idea to capture his interaction with his classmates. 

After gaining permission, I spent a day at the pre-school and four months later a collection of images were exhibited.

In 2010, I came across the CD of images from the original exhibition.

After a brief discussion with Dominic, I thought it would be great to assemble all the students for a class photograph in preparation to mark the 10th anniversary of the original exhibition.

This became logistically difficult as a number of them lived away from Toowoomba.

So the decision was made to photograph them individually.

A letter was sent to each student's parent.

For the project to succeed, it was imperative that all twenty two students agreed to be involved.

They all agreed and the project progressed in September 2010. 

I collaborated with each person to decide how they wanted to be portrayed.

They were asked to provide a statement outlining what they had learnt, what they were doing and what they wanted to do in the future.

The project's completion coincided with the beginning of the students' Year 12 at school.

These images and their statements were combined to form an exhibition and were viewed in the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in the summer of 2011-2012.

Looking Forward - their goals and dreams is a natural progression from the work gathered for the exhibition.

David Martinelli