Learn About Mississauga's Stephen Uhraney's "Chalkboard Project"
/In conversation with Mississauga’s award-winning photographer, Stephen Uhraney, on his upcoming “Chalkboard Project.”
What is the Chalkboard Project?
The Chalkboard Project is a documentary photography and storytelling initiative designed to capture authentic human expression in its simplest, most direct form. The concept is built around a single, universal object, the chalkboard, as a tool for communication, vulnerability, and truth-telling. Each participant is invited to write a personal message on the board, a thought, confession, hope, or belief and then be photographed holding it. The resulting images form an honest visual dialogue between words and faces, revealing the emotional and social landscape of our time.
The project aims to explore identity, emotion, and connection through a minimal but deeply human approach. The chalkboard becomes a mirror for the soul, temporary, imperfect, and erasable, much like our thoughts and experiences. It’s a reminder that expression doesn’t need to be polished or permanent to be powerful.
What inspired you to launch this creative initiative?
It started with something simple: a chalkboard. A surface meant for ideas, questions, confessions, and truth. What drew me in was how temporary it is, how whatever gets written can be wiped away in a second, yet while it’s there, it’s absolutely honest.
I’ve spent my entire career trying to photograph what sits underneath the surface of people’s lives, the things they feel but don’t always say out loud. The chalkboard became a way for people to write their inner world in their own handwriting, in their own words. No filters. No performance. Just truth meeting the lens.
“The Chalkboard Project feels like the purest form of the work I’ve always tried to do: quiet, raw, unfiltered humanity.”
What inspired me was the invitation it created. When someone steps up to a blank board, they aren’t posing, they’re revealing. They’re sharing a piece of themselves that might never come out in a regular portrait or conversation. That vulnerability, that rawness that’s what I chase in every documentary project I do.
The Chalkboard Project isn’t really about the board at all, it’s about the human moments that appear on it, however briefly. It’s about capturing the story in the few seconds before the words disappear.
Do you have a criteria for people who can be included in this project?
Yes, but they’re intentionally simple.
The Chalkboard Project is open to anyone willing to be honest.
There’s no age requirement, no background requirement, no “type” of person I’m looking for. All I ask is that participants are willing to pause, reflect, and write something true, something that matters to them in that moment. It doesn’t have to be profound or polished. It just has to be real.
The only “criteria,” if you can call it that, is openness
• Openness to write from the heart.
• Openness to be photographed as they are.
• Openness to let their voice be part of a larger human conversation.
That’s it. The project isn’t about perfection. It’s about humanity.
When and where will these pictures be on display?
The photographs will be on display during the CONTACT Photography Festival the month long celebration of photography.
There will actually be two exhibitions:
• A GTA show in Toronto, featuring a broad selection from the project.
• A Mississauga show at City Hall, running for the entire month of May 2026, presented as part of CONTACT
Both exhibitions will highlight the project, and together they’ll showcase the full scope of the Chalkboard Project during the festival.
What makes this project meaningful for you?
For me, the Chalkboard Project is meaningful because it strips everything down to the heart of why I photograph in the first place: to find the truth in people.
“This project lets people speak in their own handwriting, in their own words, and I photograph them exactly as they are in that instant.”
A chalkboard is simple, temporary, almost fragile yet when someone writes on it, they reveal something real. Something they might never say out loud. It becomes a doorway into their inner world, and I get to witness that moment when a person lets their guard down and shows who they really are.
I’ve spent decades looking past the surface of life, trying to capture the soul of a moment. This project lets people speak in their own handwriting, in their own words, and I photograph them exactly as they are in that instant. It’s honesty meeting portraiture.
What makes it meaningful is that it connects people. Every board, every portrait, every scribbled thought becomes part of the human experience. It reminds me and anyone who sees it that we’re all carrying stories, fears, hopes, and truths just beneath the surface.
The Chalkboard Project feels like the purest form of the work I’ve always tried to do: quiet, raw, unfiltered humanity.
