Category: Final Projects

Caroline Martel – Final Project

May 8, 2016 / Caroline Sophie Martel / 0 Comments

A Blurry Image of Women In War Photography

Throughout the semester, we looked at many images while still studying the photographer’s personal input and perspective on their work. However, this method does not always reflect reality. In an everyday life situation, one would see the image in a magazine without, most of the time, really knowing any background information about either the photographer or the story behind the shot. Once the picture the attention shifts entirely to the subject of the photo. This makes the art of photography very challenging for photojournalists. When studying Martin Parr fro instance, I found it extremely frustrating to read that he “does not talk about his photos, (he) just does them”. However, Parr in a way manages, by carrying this philosophy reflects as much as possible the reality of a viewer’s experience when looking at art or photography. Once a photo is published, I believe that it doesn’t belong entirely to its photographer anymore as it is subject to the viewer’s own interpretation and critical eye. This also makes photography extremely challenging as images can be taken out of their context and used wrongly. As Ashley Gilbertson said about his Whiskey Tango Foxtrot images, “some people saw them as pro-war photos, some others saw them as anti-war images”.

This ultimately led me to think about Ron Haviv’s thought about photojournalism: “I suddenly understood the power of photojournalism. I realized this wasn’t about me, it was about the people I was photographing.”

This idea of the forgotten really intrigued me and I started to ask myself who might be the most ‘forgotten ones’ in photojournalism. The first answer that I could think of was women. Even though we saw a lot of female subjects photographed in fashion photography and war photography; we did not talk about many female photographers. And, especially, I found it interesting to study the place of women photojournalists in war photography. Our societal preconceptions usually lead us to associate war with masculinity, a man’s business. So, what is the place of women in war photography? Are they only bound to be the subject of the images in order to create touching shots?

But as I started researching female photojournalists, I was positively surprised by my findings. Recently, to celebrate its 125th anniversary, National Geographic Magazine published a retrospective of the most influential images of the past century or so. And I was stunned to see that many of those iconic images were taken by female photographers. So, why don’t we hear more about female photographers who produce powerful and influential work in an industry known for being dominated by men?

After talking to one of my friends about it, he told me something that really lead me to study specifically the place of female photographers in war photography: “A dead body on the sidewalk is a dead body. It should be covered the same way by a man or a woman. We’re all human, we should see and be affected by a dead body the same way.” Do female photographers think about this the same way?

There are only about a dozen female war photographers actively working today so this made my research a little bit difficult and, I found that this very small number tends to create skewed and biased results. I realized that it is very important to take this into consideration for our analysis. But, why are there so few female war photographers? Well, I found that a very primitive sexism is still present in the industry even though some women broke barriers and opened doors for new generations.

First, being a photojournalist covering armed conflict is believed to be ‘too hard’ for women. They are seen as physically less strong than men and psychologically too emotional.

Also, the lifestyle of a war photographer is considered unsuitable to a woman as it requires a huge flexibility for traveling. Our society’s stigma tends to expect women to have children and to take care of them. Socially it is also more acceptable fir a man to prioritize his career over his family than it is for a woman.

I also found that some cultures see women as ‘less capable’ intellectually than men.

And finally, the most common one was that covering a conflict is ‘too dangerous’ for women. To this preconception, the former present of AP photography says very rightfully answered that “bullets are not sexist”. However, it has been proven that women are more prone to be victims of violence.

These stereotypes cause female photographers to sometimes not feel welcomed or accepted by the male figures in a war zone.

But, what do those female war photographers have to say? After studying about the society’s stigmas about female figures in a war zone, I was extremely surprised to read those women’s testimonies. Most of them said that their gender has turned out to be an advantage in their male-driven industry. But, I really am having trouble grasping this concept. I believe that their gender has been a supplementary obstacle that the first women entering the industry had to overcome.

However, after reading many testimonies, watching dozens of interviews and documentaries; I started to believe them. And I think thats exactly what they were aiming to do. They want to inspire and make us believe in their strength. And that just takes us right back to the primitive sexism in which women have to prove themselves more than men do.

However, I found it very interesting to see that female photographers are important actors in the Muslim world where religious rules and the culture is very different from the American democratic ideals. They are mentioned many times as key in the coverage of many conflicts in the Middle East. What inspired me to look at the place of female photographers in the Muslim world was the story behind Steve McCurry’s icon shot of the Afghan refugee that made the cover of National Geographic. Years after taking the first portrait that became worldwide famous, McCurry went back to Afghanistan in the hope of finding the girl and taking another portrait of her. After weeks of research, he finally found her. The only last obstacle that stood in front of McCurry was that, as a man, he could not enter the house. Therefore, he had to get a woman on site just to be able to talk to the Afghan girl. Another issue was that she could not be seen by a man without her head piece, even less get photographed without it. But, after long negotiations with the woman intermediary, McCurry finally was able to take that shot. And this is when it all made sense to me. This is when I understood that yes, in the Muslim world, being a female is an advantage. After doing some research on how women are perceived in a war zone by the civilians there, I found out that women are seen as less threatening than men.

But most importantly, in the Muslim world, women have access to houses and a family’s intimacy when as men don’t. As Lindsey Addario, war photographer published in National Geographic said, “we already have one foot in the houses”. This indeed represents a huge advantage for female photographers.

Also, some say that women create a very unique bond with their female subjects, just like man photographers do with their male subjects. I am not quite sure that I agree completely with this statement, just because it is mostly said by the female photographers themselves. I had a really hard time figuring out the reality of female photographers’ situation and experiences while covering a conflict. And this confusion is what led me to think about my project. The public does not truly know how those female photographers live while doing their job. This confusion creates a distance between the public and the photographer, leading to a shattered trust. For instance, when an incident happens just like it did in Lybia where a group of photojournalists were kidnapped and kept hostage for a while. One of those was Addario and the public’s reaction was mainly outrage: “Why was a woman involved in this? Why would Time magazine send a woman over there where women’s rights are violated?” But again, this assumption about women’s rights in Middle Eastern countries is thought from an American point of view. So, I have to admit that this was a hard subject, and still today I am not sure how to treat it. I got confused and lost many times during my research, maybe even got brainwashed by reading articles and watching interviews in which women are claiming that being a female is a huge advantage. I got inspired, for sure, but my judgement was biased. I did not read about any men photographers’ point of view on this matter and, when I did, they were just extremely politically correct, like “she proved that she was talented enough, so she got the job”. The American democratic system and ‘liberalism’ in place does not in reality allow either men or women to tell us truly what they think in fear of getting shamed or judged for their words.

So, clearly there is a lack of communication and honesty towards the public that even I could sense after doing extensive research. I was confused and did not know what or who to believe. Most of the sources that I found on this topic were published by groups of females claiming that their gender is a major advantage and their vulnerability their main strength. They say themselves that they publish work that men could not create simply because of the unique emotional bound they share with their subjects and their extreme emotional abilities. But are those traits only womanly? Are male photographers not able to express the same emotional engagement and human connection? Women photojournalists indeed have access to the intimacy of houses in the Middle East. However, how is this different on an emotional perspective than Ashley Gilbertson’s ‘Bedrooms of the Fallen’ work?

There is a clear confusion that comes from many factors, some of them being that female photojournalists do not want to appear weak in a male-driven industry and therefore might not admit certain obstacles in fear of not getting the same opportunities as men, or even the fact that the American democratic system places a politically correct ceiling over every gender.

So this is what I propose:

I would like to create a forum that serves as a social media platform designed for photojournalists covering conflicts around the world. This forum, called Wars We Talk About will be decided in 2 major sections. First of all, there would be a public blog where anyone who signed up could post, comment, send messages, see profiles and send messages anonymously or not. This anonymous function is key as it might push both women and men to share honestly to the public, who would then hopefully get a more accurate understanding of the situation. Also, one can identify their gender if wanted when creating their own profile, they would be then put in relation with others who show similar profiles or interests, just like LinkedIn does for instance.

The second part of the website is the professional portal. Its access is restricted and you would need an ID and password to enter a the closed part of it. To get an ID code, the photographer’s info and credibility has to be verified first. This way, it would be easier to control and check the accuracy of the information shared.

Globally, throughout my research, I realized that even though there are some internal misunderstandings, the photojournalism industry’s principal strength is its community. This is especially relevant when looking at women photojournalists. I read many testimonies in which women explained how the support of other female photographers was extremely valuable to them. Therefore, I decided to add a supplementary sub-section in the Professional Portal through which professional female photojournalists can connect and communicate. But I also read a lot about how men are important actors in those women’s support system too. So, this professional part of the website would need to stay open to all genders. They could share, connect, ask questions, give advice…

The fact that those photojournalists have a very nomadic lifestyle can make communication challenging. Especially, I am thinking about safety and logistics. When working, women photojournalists mostly admit that they almost always need to be escorted by a male figure and that the team around them has a huge impact on the quality of their work. And, most of the time in war coverages, there is limited time so, building an efficient team locally might be challenging. Through that professional portal, I can imagine women giving other women advice on security, sharing contacts about drivers, bodyguards, etc… Men are also welcome to participate.

Through this social media platform, the key feature of war photography that I wanted to bring out and utilize positively was the strong sense of community that exists in that field. The public part of the platform would hopefully, through its anonymous possibility, shed a better light on the place of women in war photography, a matter that is still very blurry for a lot of people, including me. The professional aspect of it would be used as a functional tool in order to maybe facilitate some aspects of the very important logistical preparation involved when sending photographers to cover a conflict.

A beta draft of this online platform is available at: http://csm487.wix.com/warswetalkabout

Free the Nipple – Michelle & Shadi Final Project

May 7, 2016 / mb5511 / 0 Comments

Final Paper

Website

Enjoy, submit, and have a great summer 🙂

Portrait Photography with Steve McCurry – by Ben Searles

May 7, 2016 / bcs338 / 0 Comments

Photographic technology was first developed in the early 1800s, with the development of the camera obscura and photolithography methods. In 1927, French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first ever true photograph. Since then, amazing advances in the art and practice of photography have been made, from faster lenses, to smaller and lighter cameras, to the introduction of digital censors photo editing software, and more.

Photography was first developed as a way to capture the world in a snapshot. Only later did people begin to view it as an art form, as something that was created with an artistic, rather than documentary, mentality. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz was largely responsible for this shift in cultural thinking, with his early 1900s work. Since then, journalistic photography has continued on its similar path, maintaining its ethical devotion to truth in imagery, while art, or more artistic, photographic has bloomed in its own right.

These days, we live in a society plastered wall to wall with photographic imagery, and the vast majority of it seems to lean towards the fictional, artistic side. And often, it is not all that hard to tell if a photographic is a work of journalism or a work of art. Journalistic imagery is far less stylized and is almost always candid. On the other hand, artistic photography is usually far more contrived and created, and can be extremely stylish.

Holmes writes, “documentary photographers strive to be objective recorders of real events and don’t meddle with their pictures. And usually they are working on assignment…” (Holmes) Journalistic photography seeks to tell the truth, and represent it through pictures. In contrast, art photography tells fictional stories, with made up details, and characters that do not exist in the real world.

The one arena where it can be hard to see the line drawn between the real world and the fantasy art world is portrait photography, a practice used by both artistic and journalistic photographers. Portraiture is the only time that a journalist is ethically allowed to pose their subjects in the photo. Portraiture is also usually the only time that subjects of photojournalism acknowledge the camera—and they often look right into it.

But there are still rules for journalistic portraiture. As Knight asserts, “The subject isn’t usually doing anything, again because the viewer should not be confused as to whether the photo is a posed portrait or a real, documentary piece of journalism.” (Knight) Indeed, the New York Times “Guidelines on Our Integrity” states that “Pictures of news situations must not be posed. In the cases of…portraits…intervention should be unmistakable to the reader, and unmistakably free of intent to deceive.”

That is not to say that journalistic portraits cannot be artistic. Upon a glance over the body of work or either Magnum or VII, one would notice that all of these photographers, while depicting real, documentary images, do so in a way that is artful and pleasing to look at. This is apparent in all of the work of the tow agencies, but especially in the portraits.

One photojournalist that takes entirely truthful, yet highly stylized, portraits is Steve McCurry. My intent with this project was to explore this art/journalism distention by attempting to recreate the distinct style and emotion characteristic of his work. I felt that a visual format was most conducive for this examination, because of course photography is visual, so what better way to explore a another photographer’s style and intent that by doing my own photographic work? This way, I can put myself behind the lens, in the “driver’s seat” and force myself to make all the same choices that McCurry himself made. I felt that only through actually creating my visuals can I fully explore the distinction between the contexts, motives, and back stories of creating portrait photographs that are considered journalism or documentary photography, rather than fine art or commercial work. I wanted to explore this project because with much of my own work, I leave myself wondering into what camp my photos fall exactly. What makes a snapshot of someone art—even if the circumstances of the photo are completely natural and unposed—and what makes it documentary work. I felt that using McCurry’s work as a lens to explore this question was a great start to answering this question.

McCurry, who was born in 1950 and joined Magnum in 1985, has become legendary for, among other things, his portrait work. He is probably most known for his photo of a young Afghan girl with striking green eyes, which appeared on the cover of an issue of National Geographic. He is famed for photographing in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Cambodia. He is perhaps most noted for his portrait work.

After looking over a good portion of his work, specifically his portraits, I noticed some artistic trends. Purely stylistically, McCurry seems to always employ filmic, saturated (but not overly) colors, high contrast yet slightly crushed blacks, centered, chest-up framing, relatively shallow depth of field, and moody use of shadows. As far as the content of the frame, he tends to shoot in the field, against often very character-building (for the subjects of the photos) background, and is able to expertly capture emotion. This is partly due to his focus on the subjects’ eyes. Always looking into the lens, the subjects have eyes that true to the saying, allow a peak into their souls, and consequently make the photo overwhelming compelling.

I was highly inspired by these photos, so I decided to make my own. My photographic exploration can be viewed at my site: http://bencsearles.weebly.com/ , which shows a project that I called “ATTEMPTING TO CAPTURE THE ‘HUMAN CONDITION’ THROUGH PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE SPIRIT OF STEVE MCCURRY.” All photos were taken in what I considered a journalistic, rather than strictly artistic, context. The first shot, a portrait of the homeless street artist Lex posing in front of his work, I took while assisting my friend Erin shoot a short documentary focusing on Lex’s life and work. Because we were interacting with Lex as journalists and documentary filmmakers, this photo serves less as a piece of fine art, which happens to include the photographic representation of a human, and more of a factual documentation of the contents of the frame. This is how Lex looks, and this is him posing in front of the his art, on the street where he sells it almost every single day.

I feel that I was able to mostly successfully capture the McCurry portrait spirit with this shot. Lex is center framed, shown-chest up, and placed in front of a blurry, character-building backdrop. He is staring deeply into the lens, and has a somewhat pained, yet very complex look on his face, especially apparent in his eyes. The photo is colorful, but not too highly saturated, and the colors are filmic and defined with a fair mount of contrast.

My though process behind the rest of the photos is similar. Every photo is framed similarly, and every subject is framed in front of a background that I feel works to contribute to the subject’s character. More importantly, these are all photos that while they are (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing, were taken in a journalistic context, as a way to document, rather than eventually entertain. For the last three photos, I broke away from the standard McCurry portrait framing, to take photos that I felt leaned slightly more towards my own style.

Bridges of New York

May 6, 2016 / gb1494 / 0 Comments

http://gabriellabower.wix.com/bridgesofny

Final Project

May 6, 2016 / Tristan Alex Oliveira / 0 Comments

Last summer, I stumbled across a job opportunity to work for a startup website nestled within the IT department of a new real-estate investment and development company named HAP, located in Midtown. Having been unfamiliar with real estate and just about anything corporate, I was not fully affiliated nor understood the company until I was commissioned to produce promotional images and video by proximity that my office for the website was within theirs. I was asked to visit various construction sites and cut together short updates regarding how far along the building processes were for each, accompanied by the site supervisor. I created somewhere around 8 videos over the course of a few months, and finally I noticed a pattern. Out of all ten of the projects currently being developed by HAP, excluding the new HAP Tower in Jersey City, six were located in East Harlem, relatively close to the subway in residential areas largely lower-middle and middle class. I had been reading about gentrification in Harlem since the start of college, and I had not realized that I was seeing an intermediary process of displacement and gentrification right in front of me, even if it was far along for many years. Through the classes I took, including one in which I produced a website about Harlem and it’s history/democratic shifts and another in which I produced a small documentary interviewing long time residents of Williamsburg and seeing their perspective on their rapidly changing neighborhood. Through these experiences, I had grown to oppose gentrification, yet only a few months prior I was documenting and helping facilitate the very process.

For many reasons, including the defunding of the website startup, I left HAP, well aware of the precautions legally to me sharing the work I produced for them. I never received any compensation for my work and had to sign release forms stating that HAP was the only entity allowed to publish the content I had made for them, so as many of my college-age New York colleagues would understand, I got, for lack of a better word, “interned.” Yet I was hungry to learn more, I felt my morals had been compromised. What I discovered all this time later is how cryptic, bureaucratic, and nuanced gentrification is as a process and how difficult it is to pinpoint exactly where to affect positive change within neighborhoods experiencing it. After all, I am a student at a university responsible for helping gentrify and monopolize entire sectors of lower Manhattan, including the East Village regarding the demolition of St. Ann’s Church despite numerous community protests against the action. I am already contributing through my tuition.

Gentrification has become a major subject of discontent and discussion within the past 25 years, especially in New York City, where neighborhoods like the East Village and Wiliamsburg, once home to lower income housing, have now become some of the most expensive places to live in the world. Ask many born-and-raised New Yorkers and they will tell you that it is the worst thing ever to have happened to the city. The concept of gentrification is rather simple, investment companies purchase plots of land inexpensively within neighborhoods that at the time are lower income. Once the surrounding areas become more populated and there becomes a demand for wealthier people to find housing, they move into the lower income neighborhoods that have essentially have been paved for them, forcing the original residents of the neighborhood out and displacing thousands of people. Take Harlem as a case study, a neighborhood rich in diversity and home to a large African-American population. From 2000-2005, 32,500 African-Americans were displaced from Harlem and were replaced by approximately 22,800 white residents, and the number has been growing ever since. With real estate becoming more and more upper-class in New York City, developers and investment companies are setting their sights on other neighborhoods, the next in line is El Barrio, or East Harlem, one of the most diverse places in New York and a historical home to a true melting pot of cultures and ethnicities including Puerto Rican, African American, Mexican, Italian, and Dominican. East Harlem

Gentrification is a self-aware process, we want to know where to point fingers, but who exactly is to blame? We can criticize the residents of the buildings themselves, but did every resident collectively organize this effort? No, but there is something to be said about how it’s usually rich, whiter people who gentrify neighborhoods, especially in New York City. But why? Well, because they are the only people who can afford the rising costs, as in Harlem, where the typical price for an apartment is over $458 per square foot. This is bound to happen when years prior real estate developers and investment platforms purchase the same properties, waiting for the opportune moment to turn it into an apartment complex, or sell it to Whole Foods. Take Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the median sales price for a home jumped from $455,000 in the second quarter of 2013 to $621,000 in 2014. This is largely due in part by organizations like CityShares, multi-million dollar investment platforms that are “seeking to capitalize on the neighborhood’s sharp growth” by buying up large sums of land and constructing them into whatever turns profit best, and a city already as overpopulated as New York, housing is an ever growing demand.

For this project, I decided to revisit the construction sites in East Harlem that HAP is currently developing and photograph them, hoping that documenting the current process and surrounding neighborhoods can provide a means for an audience to see what is going on and hopefully feel inspired to do something about it. I took inspiration from several Magnum and VII photographers with projects and works in New York City, including Elliott Erwitt, Bruce Gilden, Richard Kalvar, and Ron Haviv. I did not set out to pull a certain style from each photographer as much as try and attempt to capture images of a subject that is aesthetically uninteresting in hopes to inspire. Thinking especially of Haviv’s, I tried to play with a tone of complacency, hoping to turn what seems like a mundane occurrence in New York or any major city into something informative, hoping they might ignite action.

Ultimately, HAP is not a major development company, and have plenty of legal issues they are currently fighting in regards to their projects. They are not the face of gentrification nor are they leading it, but it is the myriad of groups like them that are helping force lower income residents out of their neighborhoods. To actually make a difference, it requires action, and solidarity with local efforts, such as the East Harlem Preservation and GOLES in the Lower East Side. Supporting local businesses also is has a large impact, as many businesses lose grounds to larger corporations and chains as neighborhoods drastically shift. Gentrification is not a natural process, it ruins communities and forces people out of their homes, and to help hinder such an elusive process, the support of local efforts comes first and foremost.

EL BARRIO

Post your final projects here!

May 6, 2016 / Jenny Kijowski

Add your final projects as a new post, and make sure you categorize your post under “Final Projects” so they display properly.

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Final assignment

Photography & The Stigma Surrounding Mental Illness

May 6, 2016 / Sarah M Smith / 0 Comments

instagram.com/lookatme.ntalhealth

The medium of photography has the capacity to be extremely personal and entirely honest. Unfortunately, the medium is also able to be dishonest; images hold more power than we consciously assume, and they can easily perpetuate stereotypes and stigmas within our society without complete intent. With regards to mental illness, a powerful stigma exists in all aspects of our society. As Peter Byrne points out in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment in 2000, “Mental illness, despite centuries of learning and the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ is still perceived as an indulgence, a sign of weakness” (Byrne 1). There are many complex reasons as to why this stigma still exists today, regardless of the advanced knowledge the science world now knows about mental illness. Photography plays an arguably significant role in the preservation and extension of this stigma; more often than not, photos of extreme, isolating images are used to represent the whole of mental illnesses in the media, advertising, and even so-called awareness campaigns. This stereotypical, false representation of mental illness is not only unfair, but also truly detrimental towards any attempts to break down the social stigma surrounding the mental health community.

Photography and mental illness come together in a large, positive way in the work of Ashley Gilbertson. He is of course renowned for his work with preserving the memory of veterans, many of whom died due to poorly diagnosed or poorly treated mental illnesses after returning home from war. Gilbertson himself openly speaks about his personal encounter with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after he returned from covering the war in Iraq (Mccauley). His ability to identify with this mental illness undoubtedly heightens his ability to photograph it truthfully.

In 2013, Gilbertson photographed Stacy Pearsall, a fellow conflict photographer who was in the midst of coping with PTSD and suicidal thoughts after having travelled imbed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photos are stunning; they show Pearsall smoking a pipe in the woods behind her house and tending to her horse outside her barn. They are very high quality images, but the content is overwhelmingly average. Pearsall does not look incredibly sad, nor incredibly happy. She simply exists in her personal normalcy. Herein lies the beauty of these photos: Gilbertson was able to capture a woman with a mental illness just acting like a human being.

This series of photos was the inspiration for my project. I have personally dealt with mental illness in family members around me growing up, and within myself. I also feel personally affected by the stigma – I ignored the social anxiety and depression that shaped my life for as long as possible. I unknowingly partook in “self-stigmatization,” which is accepting a stigma to be true and then turning it on oneself, usually in the form of shame (Corrigan 485). On this topic, Byrne again ponders:

The question arises as to just what all this shame and secrecy is about. Negative cultural sanction and myths combine to ensure scapegoating in the wider community. The reality of discriminatory practices supplies a very real incentive to keep mental health problems a secret. Patients who pursue the secrecy strategy and withdraw have a more insular support network.

All of the stigmatizing in our society is supported in the photographs and portrayals we see representing mental illness. In a study of how mental illness is shown in television, a study found only 3% of characters to be openly impacted by an illness, and of that small percentage, “the mentally ill were most likely to commit violence and to be victimized (Signorielli). Additionally, “the mentally ill characters were less likely to be employed outside the home, and if so employed were likely to be seen as failures” (Signorielli). In advertisements that deal in some way with mental illness – whether it be for medication to treat symptoms, a suicide hotline promotion, or just a general good-will ad about reaching out to those in need – the illness is always portrayed in the extreme. A dark, depressed man curled up in the fetal position, meaning depression. A woman with her face in her hands, hair frazzled, meaning anxiety. These images are difficult to relate to for someone without these illnesses, and they may even be difficult to relate to for someone with these illnesses – photographs that dramatize and even exaggerate certain characteristics of mental illness further the distance between “the mentally healthy” and “the mentally ill,” prolong the tendency to “other” those who suffer from an illness beyond their control, extend the cycle of shame and fear and secrecy, and perpetuate the stigma surrounding mental illness.

With both this and the refreshingly more pleasant and “normal” work done by Ashley Gilbertson in mind, my project became an attempt to capture, basically, a boring day in the life of someone with social anxiety. I based the style of my photography on Jessica Dimmock’s series of photos on uninsured Americans – she used low-resolution, almost grainy imagery to show a woman’s struggle to receive cancer treatment without health insurance. I loved the way the images looked, and as I was only working with the camera on an iPhone 5S, the idea of “low-res” was particularly appealing.

None of my photos have people in them, and that was a conscious decision. Thinking through the biggest day-to-day struggle for me and my anxiety, I felt that finding a place to sit is always the most challenging. Having spoken to other people with similar anxieties, this seems to be common – it can be very stressful to either sit surrounded by other people or sit alone; nothing ever feels ideal. So, the majority of my images deal with seating in some capacity. One shows the outside of a therapist’s office, which is just a regular office in the Liberal Studies building; one shows medicine mixed in on a bookshelf. I created an Instagram account for this project and uploaded my photos through there, mimicking Dimmock’s style through filtering each photo in the same way. I felt a social media account would be ideal to present these bland, fairly boring photos – through social media, we are expected to present our best, most idealized self to the world. This only adds to the capacity and tendency to be secretive and ashamed of one’s true feelings and struggles.

I know I am not a good photographer and I certainly do not claim to be one. I had a strong motivation and idea behind my project, and I carried out the visual side as best I could. What I hope is conveyed through this project, even a little bit, is that “normal” means so many different things to so many different people. Someone with a mental illness has a different “normal” than someone without one, but that does not make them any less of a person. Portrayals of mental illness in photography and the media only make this more difficult for people to see; the stigma surrounding mental illness will not break down until people are able to see one another not as “other,” but as fellow human beings.

Works Cited

Byrne, Peter. “Stigma of Mental Illness and Ways of Diminishing It.” BJPsych Advances, 06 Jan. 2000. Web. 06 May 2016.

Corrigan, Patrick. “Structural Levels of Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination.” Schizophrenia Bulletin. Oxford Journals, n.d. Web. 04 May 2016.

Dimmock, Jessica. “America’s Uninsured.” VII Photo Archive. VII Photo, 2007. Web. 02 May 2016.

Gilbertson, Ashley. “Military Suicide.” VII Photo Archive. VII Photo, 2014. Web. 03 May 2016.

McCauley, Adam. “Overexposed: A Photographer’s War With PTSD.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 06 May 2016.

Signorielli, Nancy. “The Stigma of Mental Illness on Television.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 33.3 (2009): n. pag. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 03 May 2016.

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Empowerment of College Women & the Everyday

May 6, 2016 / Grace / 0 Comments

Women’s Empowerment through the Everyday

1. Ivory Miniatures

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow? — How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour? —Jane Austen

Often, many critics of Austen’s words, originally written to her nephew, Edward, improperly cite her words as a way to portray a deprecation of “female” writing as suitable or accommodating to the expectations of the female gender (Leffel). Her stories of young women, of love, of courtship, and femininity—these seem to represent her succumbing to the expectations put on women in literature. However, a good look at her writing reveals “a dazzling array of experiments with literary form and genre… [that are] filled with rebellious, transgressive heroines who steal, murder, elope, binge, and booze” and notably radical content that extends far beyond the demarcated field of literature in which women in her era were expected to remain (Leffel). Austen “playfully skewers generic conventions and forces the reader to re-think customary constructions of the novel” and miniaturizes the “picturesque” genre through an empowerment of the typical, expected, everyday topics. She uses heroines “who boldly and unapologetically flaunts gender boundaries, social codes, and even laws…[challenging] her era’s stifling restrictions on women’s bodies and minds at the same time that she questions exactly what constitutes a ‘novel’” (Leffel). She takes the “everyday” woman, her everyday settings and the typical representation of such, in order to comment upon “gendered conventions and social and political implications that this genre in particular—and the novel more generally—normatively assumes” (Leffel). Through her writing and use of satire of the expected tropes in women’s writing, Austen empowers the everyday notions of “femininity” and transforms them into platforms of growth and strength.

2. The Ethics of Seeing

Susan Meiselas, a Magnum photographer, empowers in a medium different from Austen’s—through photography. As a lover of anthropology, Meiselas shares an intrigue of the human condition, constantly searching for meaning within the people she captures. She often speaks about the “ethics of seeing,” which “involves connecting, engaging, and feeling compassion for your subjects” as a way into truly brining value to a photo (“The Ethics of Seeing”). By connecting with the photo’s story and context, viewers are pushed to extend themselves out into the world and explore overarching themes. The particular photograph that I connected with and used to push myself into the direction of my project was taken in Monimbo, Nicaragua, in 1979, while she was documenting the country’s treacherous revolution. In this photo, a woman, in an eye-catching red dress, pushes a dead body, wrapped up and tied down to a wooden cart. More time and research with this photo led me to the following facts: the woman is 14 years old, and the dead body is her husband. Meiselas represents her powerfully, in a bold dress, holding up the dead body. To me, this photo portrayed the great hand women have had and continue to have in holding up history. Through this photo, I went beyond the story behind the woman and the dead body and grasped onto the potential symbolic implications of this depiction: the concept of strong women. With this idea in mind, I look into some more of Meiselas’ other work, particularly her work on carnival strippers.

3. Candid Representation

In Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), her first major work, Meiselas, without eroticizing or sexualizing, captures the raw reality of the lives of “women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina” (Meiselas). Overcoming the stigma and potential preconceived biases that could easily have been attached to her work on women who hold jobs that are not respected in society, she candidly—and truthfully—observed their situation. Using both photographs and interviews, Meiselas captured these women on stage and backstage, and “what is revealed is that, behind the curtain, the dancers are essentially workers. Taking a few minutes off, they are resting, cleaning up, smoking” (English). She shows the uncompromising truth of their lives which are not always about being sex icons. She documents their everyday, and in this, like Austen, Meiselas empowers their efforts to make a living the best they could within a “seedy” world. She emphasizes the voices of these women and challenges the societal conventional confines that aim to demean and weaken the strength of women in such jobs.

4. My Project

Through these three lenses, combining the idea of empowerment through the rawness of the everyday and the concept of “holding up” history, I found myself focusing on a subject that was real—and close—to me: women in college. Through photosets of my friend, Sam, in different settings, holding different things, I strived to paint a few different ways in which women in college can be empowered in the everyday, the “ordinary,” through the ivory miniatures of their daily lives. Like Meiselas, I wanted to take advantage of the illustrative, narrative quality that photographs embrace. In order to paint a tangible depiction of female empowerment through the everyday, I decided to use platform of the photo collage. Through the combining of photos that capture the whole body, the hand, the act of holding up and object, I created a fuller representation of the empowerment of women through everyday concepts.

I wanted to explore the empowerment of women without having to romanticize them, to portray strong women in ordinary life, rather than as superheroes or goddesses. Thus, I created three photosets, titled Sword, Shield, and Armor; each one signifying one way in which the everyday, the ordinary, the usual, gives power to women in college.

A play on the phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” Sword portrays how expression, the concept of writing, acts as a tool for women in college to not only express themselves but speak up. Particularly in an era of technology and internet, sharing your writing has become incredibly simple. Through blogs, diaries, journals—entities often associated with the female experience and popular among women in college—we are encouraged to and hold the authority to share the female voice which is much less prevalent in mainstream news, media, and literature. By “holding up” our pens, women garner the propensity to be heard, to create, to use writing as a tool for social change and equality; we strike against the trends in our world—in literature, journalism, and influential schools of thought that are charged with the masculine experience. Through the power of the written word, she speaks up for her strength, her belief, her capabilities.

Armor focuses on what women choose to wear and fights the stigma around the phrase, “dressed to be seen.” Taken at Washington Square Park, full of people who come to see and to be seen, I spurn the idea that women are objects of entertainment and dress for others. Beyond deconstructing the stigma around how women dress, how they should dress, and how their clothes label them, I want to reject the stigma around the idea of presentation, of showing off. Through their clothes—accessories, makeup—women not only express themselves but are empowered to use her the clothes she holds up with her body as a demonstration of the beauty of herself, her style, her woman-ness. Instead of being shackled by labels, women dress in their “armor” against the demarcation of the identity of a woman based on her clothes. The way she chooses to present herself empowers her in her self-expression, her presentation of herself to the world, allowing her to not be shaken by attacks against her identity. She is strong in who she is and she shows this through the clothes she chooses to wear each day.

The last photoset, Shield, represents how college women empower themselves through knowledge and education. With intelligence and wisdom, women can stay informed and well-educated on the workings of the world in order to fight against ignorance, injustice, and inequality. Through education, women are empowered to not only take on influential, powerful positions in the workforce, the government, the society, but also protect—to shield—themselves from further discrimination and patronization. Education equates to independence. Through the act of learning, women garner skillsets to help them thrive and support themselves in the world, instead of falling into the molds society expects us to fall into. Through her education, she harnesses the power to expand in a world that wants her to stay still.

Overall, through my project, I depict women empowerment, as a movement that has nothing to do with hierarchy, putting women over men. The primary objective of feminism— is about urging women to believe in their capabilities and identities as living beings who are capable of immense strength and creativity. As Mary Wollstonecraft states, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”

Works Cited (and Consulted)

Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, a Family Record. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Print.

English, Deirdre. Stripped Bare: Nude Girls and Naked Truth.” Carnival Strippers. By Susan Meiselas. Steidl: Steidl, Gerhard Druckerei und Verlag, 2003. 153-9. Print.

The Ethics of Seeing. Perf. Susan Meiselas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Web.

Harrison, Jim. “A Lens on History.” Harvard Magazine. Harvard Magazine Inc, 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 06 May 2016.

Leffel, John C. “Jane Austen’s Miniature ‘Novel’: Gender, Politics and Form in The Beautiful Cassandra.” Persuasions 32 (2010): 184-95.

Meiselas, Susan. “Susan Meiselas Photographer.” Carnival Strippers. Magnum Photos, 1972-1975. Web. 06 May 2016.

“Portrait Miniature.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.

Seymour, Tom. “Susan Meiselas: Carnival Strippers.” British Journal of Photography. Aptitude Media Ltd., 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 06 May 2016.

Todd, Janet. “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen.” British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History. Ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 76-97.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, the Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1988. Print.

The Economics Of Food Inequality, And Community Gardens in NYC

May 6, 2016 / Mia S Jacobs / 0 Comments

Go to this site!

http://msj3328.wix.com/foodnyc

After coming across Starved for Attention, I began thinking about how to bring about change without asking for donations. Something that we talked about a lot during the discussion about Starved for Attention was the site’s use of a petition. We came to the conclusion that the petition was a good idea, but some parts of the website were not entirely convincing enough (i.e. the amount of content on the site, stereotypes of women and children) to prompt a viewer to enter their name into a petition and support their cause.

For my final project, I was inspired to tackle the idea of hunger in New York City. Like Starved for Attention, I thought that creating a site that ultimately encourages users to sign a petition would be an effective way to present a problem, and a call to action. I then realized that impoverished around the world tend to grow their own foods, despite having little to no money. The opposite is true in New York City. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that people living in poverty in New York City are more likely to buy unhealthy and nutritionally lacking fast food rather than fresh, pure foods. That is because seemingly basic items, like tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, etc. can be considered luxury items, and a privilege if one is able to afford them.

The cost of living in New York is excessively high. According to the Council for Community and Economic Research, groceries in New York cost between 28% and 39% more than the national average (Wallace). To that end, New York City sees elevated levels of poverty. In 2015, New York City reported an 18.3% poverty rate, compared to statewide poverty rate of 15.9% (NYSCAA). With necessities like food costing significantly more than the rest of the country, and considering the poverty rate in New York City, I wanted to explore the cost of food in New York City and try to find a solution to help those of low socioeconomic statuses to be able to attain healthier foods. Clearly, those who are impoverished are not doing anything wrong when they buy fast foods. But for a dollar in New York City, one could buy either an entire meal at McDonald’s, or a single, raw vegetable at a market—if that.

At first, I created a website to demonstrate the price of food in New York. I attempted to contrast food that can be bought at different price points, such as $1.00 pizza and McDonald’s, versus a Russ & Daughter’s lox and bagel board, or farmer’s market vegetables. For the sake of my own aesthetic style and also to dignify the food at all price points, I attempted to make each photo look as appealing to the viewer as possible.

Once I created that, I had decided that I proved a point, but in emulating Starved for Attention, I needed a potential solution to the issue and some call to action. I immediately thought that community gardens placed in empty lots in low-income neighborhoods would not only help to beautify the city, but would also help to educate and empower people who may not be able to afford fresh foods. Similarly, community gardens are sustainable, and would ultimately save its residents money.

In an NPR podcast titled, There Goes The Neighborhood, an organization called Arts East New York had created art installations in an empty lot, which served to educate the community and bring people together. This is exactly my intent for advocating the development of community gardens. However, the lot mentioned in the podcast was taken over by developers under Mayor DeBlasio’s 80/20 affordable housing project.

This development program, titled, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program creates new buildings (often in low income neighborhoods) that guarantee a certain percentage of housing to be allocated for low-income buyers. While this is a great idea in theory, the podcast mentions that many of these new buildings are going up in areas where gentrification is happening. To that, if predominantly young, well-off residents move into these buildings and gentrify the area, this will create bigger disparities in the community, and original residents will continue to struggle. We can see this through the opening of “high end” grocery stores like Whole Foods, which cater to a much higher price point than many can afford.

As a result, I decided that my call to action would be to petition Mayor DeBlasio. While his development plan has been approved by the city council, the goal of my website is to convince him to allocate a certain percentage of lots in low income neighborhoods to be developed as community gardens.

In order to convince website visitors to sign the petition, I’ve also included two resources that demonstrate how to create a community garden. The first, called Urban Reviewer, is an interactive map created by 596 Acres, a nonprofit aiming to create community spaces in New York’s empty lots. This feature could be used to demonstrate the number of empty lots in New York City, but could also encourage viewers to find an empty lot near them. Additionally, I provided a link to an article that explains how to start a community garden in New York City. It attempts to make the process easy. Ena McPherson, a woman who works at two community gardens in New York, states, “You don’t need money to start [a] garden, you just need to get yourself hooked up with the [city] agencies, the resources out there to get you started” (Evelly).

In the end, I hope that my website serves as a good starting off point for people to begin thinking about the benefits of a community garden. I think that my choice of digital format is necessary in presenting multiple issues. The photos that I took for this project are only a starting point. Through a well-organized, visual experience, I would hope that the simplicity of the website that I created would ultimately help to convince people to sign the petition.

Works Cited:

http://www.starvedforattention.org/

https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-cost-of-living-in-new-york-city (Wallace).

http://nyscommunityaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2015-Poverty-Report-w-50th-logos-for-online.pdf (NYSCAA).

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/neighborhood/

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/mih/mandatory-inclusionary-housing.page

http://www.urbanreviewer.org/#map=12/40.7400/-74.0012&sidebar=plans

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3038089/mapping-new-yorks-vacant-lots-to-use-them-to-create-a-more-vibrant-city

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140924/astoria/how-you-can-turn-new-york-citys-vacant-lots-into-community-gardens (Evelly).

9/11 Memorial

May 5, 2016 / mb4634@nyu.edu / 0 Comments

The inspiration for this project largely comes out of another project I did last year while studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. While there, I became fascinated by how history manifests itself in the public space of the city. What really caught my attention in particular, was the Holocaust Memorial. As a Jewish American, I was initially annoyed by the way many people interacted with the space. The memorial itself is meant to be interactive. Designed by Peter Eisenman, the memorial is made of 2,7000 concrete slabs that only differ in height. They are arranged in a grid, and people are able to walk through the grid any way they want experiencing “the wave like form differently from each different position.” I kept on wondering if is supposed to be interactive, what happens if people interact with the place in the “wrong” way? Can there be rules for a public space, even if it is a place meant for mourning or remembrance?

As this semester progressed, I began thinking more about how these themes relate to the 9/11 Memorial in New York. More so than the Holocaust Memorial, the 9/11 Memorial has much more personal significance to me. I was seven years old on September 1, 2001, living about 30 miles north of New York City. The day itself is one of my earliest memories. The teachers in my elementary school were not allowed to tell us what was going on, and as the morning went on, more and more parents arrived at the school to get there kids. I remember when my babysitter finally arrived, my brother, sister and I were confused because we weren’t allowed to get ice cream from the truck we usually got it from after school. When we arrived at home, footage of the attacks were playing on the TV in our living room. My brother and his friend who came over said something along the lines of “woah cool,” thinking the footage was from a movie, at which point, my mom informed us that the attacks were real. My only other memory of that day is trying to go into my parents room where my dad was after getting home from his office a block away from the World Trade Center. The door was locked and my mom told me I couldn’t go in for a little while. I think I remember that day less because I was afraid, but because all of the adults in my life were acting in a way that I was too young to understand.

Like much of my generation, I grew up in a world that was completely changed by 9/11, and the War on Terror that fallowed. Maybe if I was 10 years older, it would be easier for me to grasp how the world has changed because of the attacks. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi describes a “War on Terror culture”. He writes, “War on Terror culture means that the 9/11 Memorial, supposedly dedicated to ending intolerance and ignorance, offers pamphlets in nine languages but bizarrely not Arabic, and the 9/11 tour concludes with a film considered by many to be inflammatory toward Islam” (13) The film Bayoumi describes is called The Rise of Al Qaeda, and before the museum opened, the film was shown to a group of interfaith clergy. The only imam in the group, said of the film, “Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site.”, while the museum defends the film, saying it was created with the advisement of experts on Islam and terrorism (NY Times). Like most memorials, the 9/11 memorial is not a place without politics, and I was interested in how the politics of the memorial affect the way people interact with space, if it did have any effect at all.

Another interesting perspective on the 9/11 memorial comes from Marita Sturken, in her book Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. According to Sturken, the 9/11 memorial has become a place of sentiment and kitsch. The kitsch she describes is not something shown in the design of the memorial itself, but rather, in the souvenirs you can buy at the memorial or the nearby museum shop. She writes, “A kitsch image or object not only embodies a particular kind of prepackaged sentiment, but conveys the message that this sentiment is universally shared, that it is appropriate, and importantly, that it is enough. When this takes place in the context of politically charged sites of violence, the effect is inevitably one that reduces political complexity to simplified notions of tragedy.” (26) She believes that the 9/11 memorial (and its entire complex, including the Freedom Tower) is less about a place of redemption, and more one of mourning and patriotism. This is a problem, because it portrays the acts in a watered down way.

Before taking photos at the memorial, I decided to see how Magnum and VII members photographed the site. One photo by Susan Meiseles, shows a group of businessmen and women observing a moment of silence at the memorial on September 11, 2015. They are all wearing varying shades of gray suits with the hands folded in front of them. Another photo by Ron Haviv shows a Pennsylvania State Constable saluting an American flag on the 10th anniversary of the attacks with a cigar hanging from his mouth. A third by Eli Reed shows people watching the memorial ceremony on the one year anniversary of the attacks. Many people are holding American flags and have camera straps hanging from their necks. The last photo reminded me of one of the installations at the recent Laura Poitras exhibit at The Whitney Museum, which shows people watching ground zero the day after the attacks in slow motion. These three photos, in varying ways show patriotism and sorrow. They also reverse the gaze of the normal way we see ground zero, and the memorial built in its place in images. Instead of looking at the memorial itself, we are looking at people looking at the memorial. However, I was interested in how people would act at the memorial on every other day. My photos show people at the 9/11 memorial on April 28, 2016.