Lord Forgive Them for They Know Not What They Do!

As I continue to work on my Faith in Sweet Auburn Project I am focusing on the destruction, construction and reconstruction process.  As old histories are being paved over new histories are being built.  As the street of Auburn Avenue is being torn up and tracks for the Atlanta street car are being laid, new manhole covers are being installed, new electrical lines are going up, the workers who are doing this work are literally laying the foundation for a new / renewed history for Auburn Avenue.  Do these workers realize that their work is literally going down in history?  Their work is the foundation for the future of a street whose time had passed and these workers, who routinely go about their work on a daily basis, are the breath that will breathe life back into these streets.

As these workers go about their work I try to engage them as I take their pictures.  I always ask, “What are you doing? What is this?” I ask because I’m naturally inquisitive and I am trying to build a relationship with them.  I am trying to connect with them and their work.  As we engage in conversation their reply is about the task they are completing at the time.  They tend to ask what I am doing: “Are you a photographer?”  I respond yes and then I tend to go on about my project.  They are interested in my project but for them they are simply doing their job.  They are not like me making more out of this than it might warrant. They are doing their job and in reality I am just doing my job.  We are connected in some weird way as we dance around each other.  I am try to capture what they are doing in time and they are trying to move on and get the project completed.

 At times it appears that they are peaking at me as I am peering at them through the viewfinder.  That separation between them and me as I put the camera up to my eye to frame the shot is more than symbolic. We see the work they are doing very differently.  They are just doing their job.  This is what they do everyday.  They are great at what they do.  They are doing a great job.  They don’t appear to be asking the types of questions I am asking, and I don’t expect them to, as I am not asking the question they are asking.  As I reflect on our roles, the construction workers and my work as the photographer / storyteller, how far apart are we?  I am doing my job.  I am doing my job as a sociologist who has been trained to ask question about gentrification.  As a photographer I am being trained to capture this story in pictures and pray that someone cares.  I am trying to preserve the old story while recording the new story that is being written.

We are doing our job!  We are all called to do our job or follow our calling.  Some want to suggest what others should be doing.  My reply has always been if you do what you are supposed to be doing it will hold you and others accountable.  I am going to take some prints to my colleagues who are doing the work on the street this week.  I am going to invite them to visit the blog and engage me in dialogue.  I want to take some them to lunch. I want to get to know them and their work and I want them to get to know my work and me.  At the foundation of this project are relationships.  How will we grow together as we build together?  As we are all players in the destruction, construction and reconstruction how do we play together?

The Atlanta Daily World Has Reported Its Last Day and the Street Car Has Arrived

The building sitting on 143 Auburn Avenue has been sold and approved for remodeling.  William Alexander Scott II founded the Atlanta Daily World Newspaper in 1928.  This weekly paper became a semi-weekly in May 1930, and a tri-weekly in April 1931.  In 1932 the paper became the first black daily in the United States in the 20^th Century.  The building of this great institution still sits on Sweet Auburn. 

Atlanta Daily World Building, February 19, 2014

When it was announced in 2012 that the building, this historical landmark was to be sold, and the building to be demolished there was an outcry in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.  Another historical landmark gone! The Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District launched an online petition to save the building.  After protest, outcry and fighting Alexi Scott Reeves in a joint statement with the developer Integral Group announced that the façade would remain but the building interior would have to be demolished.

On January 8, 2014 the building was sold to Atlanta-based Gene Kansas Commercial Real Estate.  Plans are to construct a mixed-use development.  Kansas has said that he plans to keep plaques on the door that recognize the Atlanta Daily World’s 86 years of print journalism.  Can you imagine at one point this company printed more that 40 separate newspapers at its plant on Sweet Auburn and these papers were distributed around the United States. The first chain of African American newspapers has been reduced to a plaque on a door!

On February 12, 2014 a hearing was held at 4:00 p.m in the Council Chambers on the second floor of Atlanta City Hall and the plan to transform history into a plaque was approved.  I get it!  I understand Mrs. Reeves selling the property. I get the redevelopment / gentrification of Sweet Auburn.  I understand what is going on but it still bothers me.  When I see my brother sleeping in the door of the building that is to be redeveloped I have ask where does he sleep in six months?  When the mixed-use development is build who will live there (right next to the Apex Museum)?  Will those who move in realize they are sleeping on holy ground?  Will they read the plaque?

John, sleeping at Atlanta Daily World, February 16, 2014

This week also marked the delivery of the first Atlanta Street Car.  On February 17, 2014 the first street car was securely placed in the vehicle garage at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Fort Street, right under Interstate 75 and across from the park where the John Wesley Dobbs Sculpture sits.  It was something to see the streetcar backed in under the highway as The Dobbs Sculpture and the resident of Auburn Avenue looked on. I was there all afternoon. Reporters came and went.  They spoke to few who had gathered around, got their sound bite and picture and the story was over.  Not for me.  I am living this story. 

The Atlanta Street Car Arrives

I went back the next day and the next day.  I will continue to go back!  I am talking to my brothers and sisters who are sleeping on these streets and I am asking what does this mean for them?  What does it mean for Thelma’s Barbecue where the building out of which the restaurant operates is for sale?  

John Wesley Dobbs Sculpture 

Once again I get it but I have still have questions about justice. I worry about losing historical landmarks.  I worry about people in the streetcar and riding by our history, stopping at the King Center and then eating and drinking themselves merry on ancestral ground.  I worry about us forgetting to remember.  Will African Americans forget that on this soil the foundation was laid for the prosperous life we enjoy in this city?  What do we owe our ancestors to make sure they aren’t forgotten?  How will we insure that there story is told again, and again after the gentrification has occurred? 

No Parking on the Dance Floor: The Dance of Gordon Parks

No Parking on the Dance Floor: The Dance of Gordon Parks

“I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America – poverty, racism, discrimination.”

Gordon Parks

You can choose your mentors and I choose Gordon Parks.  Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer to work for the famed Life Magazine.  He started at Life Magazine in 1948.  Prior to going to Life Magazine Mr. Parks had turned his camera to the South Side of Chicago and he chronicled the poverty that African Americans were suffering under in Chicago. While Chicago was called the “Promised Land” and millions of African Americans were migrating from down south to up north, or what some called up south, looking for a better life they found themselves suffocating under the weight a race based and class based city that was segregated.  In 1941 Mr. Parks exhibition of photographs telling the suffering of his people in the ghettos of Chicago won him a fellowship wit the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

American Gothic

At the FSA Parks worked with the well-established photographer Ron Stryker.  It was Stryker who   Parks was warned that his work was to strong of an indictment of America.  His most famous image American Gothic when first seen by Stryker he said to Parks, “This is an indictment of America, and it can get all of my photographers fired.”  Parks did not back down, he continued to push, shoot, write and ensure that his work got out and America was forced to look poverty, racism and discrimination in the face!

was both a mentor to Parks and a person who reportedly told Parks to tone his work down.

Parks didn’t park with pictures.  As Life Magazine closed it’s doors in 1972 Parks didn’t sit on the steps and cry. He had already written a best selling book The Learning Tree and produced and directed the movie adaptation of his book. In 1971 as Life was preparing to pack up because it hadn’t caught up with the new age being dominated by television Parks was finishing up his next movie project.  That movie project was Shaft.  Yes, I am talking about Shaft! Parks was a bad mother ….shut my mouth! I don’t think so..I am talking about Gordon Parks.

 

Gordon Parks on set of Shaft with Richard Roundtree

Parks was an artist who understood how to navigate the changing times, adapt his art and continue to be relevant and make sure he was heard and seen.  He was a writer, composer, moviemaker and photographer.  As the landscape around him was shifting he adapted and succeeded.  He didn’t cry about yesterday and how the times had changed but rather he changed with the times while not losing his soul.  As the photographic world and the world in general is going through massive change today what will we do?  Fred Ritchin put it this way in his book After Photography

Gordon Parks

“For those of who think of digital media as simply providing more efficient tools, what we are witnessing today is an evolution in media.  This is the more reassuring, business-as-usual stance, probably held by the majority.  For those who see the digital as compromising a markedly different environment than the analog, what we are currently observing is no less than a revolution.” P. 20

We are in the midst of a revolution.  How are we going to make sure we are seen and heard during this time?  Will we change with the age without losing our soul or will we huddle and darkrooms and reminisce about the time when film was king / queen?  Will we adapt to the world fueled by virtual relationships, virtual spaces and the democratization of the creation and sharing of art?  Will we find our American Gothic, shoot it, share it, write about, grow a following and make change?  Will we learn from artist like Gordon Parks who was relevant and productive until the day he died? 

To learn more about Gordon Parks I offer the following:

A nice slice of Mr. Parks work is in this four minute video.  If you want to see his work, take four minutes and be AMAZED!

This 90 minute documentary gives you the best overall look at Gordon Parks and his work.

http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org

I Do What I Do Because I Love It: The Vivian Maier Model

Vivian Maier

Why do you do what you do?  What do you do for most of your day?  The answer is probably work.  We spend most our day at our job, doing what we do to make a living.  Our motivation for what we do might be mixed as to why we do what we do.   I have always strived to do what I love and pray that I could make a living doing it.  So far it’s working out for me.

I have never done what I’ve done looking for fortune or fame but rather for fulfillment.  As I approach my 52^nd birthday this month I am once again retooling and retraining myself to do what I love. I love to tell stories via the written word, photography and videography.  My time at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is a time of molding.  I am slowly becoming a photographer and as I am on this quest I want to remind myself that I am doing this because I love it.

One thing I have done at SCAD is search out the artist whose life and work I connect with.  For me it is more than your work it is your life that I also have to connect with.  I have major connection with Vivian Maier.   Vivian Maier shot non-stop her entire adult life.  She shoot not to show her work or sell her work but because she loved her work.  She died in 2009 and there is no record that she showed her work to anyone. Her work was discovered by John Maloof  in 2007 and he brought her work to the  public and began to promote her work (see story below).

When I first saw her street photographs I was hooked.  I was moved by her work.  Every artist has that person, that artist who they connect with and that person becomes their mentor (directly or indirectly).  For me Vivian Maier has become one of my mentors. While I love her work I am even more attracted to what appears to be the motivation behind her work.  I believe she did it because she loved it.  She couldn’t help but shoot pictures, create images, and she did all of her life.  She walked with that Rolleiflex camera around her neck and she created images. 

Vivian Maier

She didn’t shoot to show or to sell but now her prints are selling like hot cakes for hot prices.  Her motivations were pure and the reward still came. Some debate whether she would want her work being shown and sold.  Ms. Maier died in 2009 and by the time John Maloof realized whose work he had discovered all he could find of her was an obituary.  We don’t know how she would feel about her posthumous fame.  What we do know is that her work is being received by the world with rave reviews.  She is inspiring a new breed of street photographers like myself.  Her work has made a difference because I believe she loved what she did, she was good at it, and she worked hard at her craft.

In the end I believe we must do what we love.  We must work hard at it, get the training / education we need and never look back.  We must love what we do so much that if we never made a penny from it we would still do it.  I don’t want to do what I do for the show or the doe but rather for the love.  In the end I do hope that my work will make the world we live in a more loving and just place.  For my work to make the world a more loving and just place I must love the world and the work I do that I commit back to the world in love.  What do you love?  What are you becoming?   How are you preparing yourself to do what you were created to do?   Do you believe that you were created on purpose to make a difference?

Vivian Maier

Wasteland and the Transformative Powers of Art

Wasteland and the Transformative Powers of Art

 Get Involved - Make A Difference

One of the joys of attending the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is you have the privilege of sitting in class with great professors and great artists.  I am dwarfed by the skills of my colleagues and teachers but yet I sit with them.  To sit with them is literally inspiring.  To sit with them and share our creations and reflect on what it is we were created to do is moving.  Today we watched the documentary Wasteland.  I had watched this documentary two times by myself.  It was something special to watch it with my colleagues and to be pushed by our professor to ask searching questions in relationship to the documentary and our work.

What motivates us to do what we do?  How will our work connect with our passion to make the world a more just place?  In Wasteland Vik Muniz, the artist returns to his roots to make a difference.  A man raised in poverty, who has become a successful artist abroad returns home to make a difference.

Suelem

As artist we don’t have a right to impose what we want for others on them but rather we have a responsibility to ask what they want and how we might partner with them in the work of liberation and justice.  The art did the work in the case of Wasteland.  The art transformed the artists, he was able to reconnect with his roots!  The art, gave hope to the leaders of the movement.  Art can make a difference.

To sit in a classroom at SCAD and watch this documentary with my colleagues and professor was so moving.  I wasn’t sitting in my study, isolated, crying by myself but rather I was moved to be in a room of artist who are committed to doing work that makes a difference.  Our professor is helping us look inside and find what it is in us that makes us look through the lens and compose that shot, take the picture and tell the story.  We can make a difference and make this world a more just place if we will just follow that still small voice that calls us, to do us not for personal gain and wealth but for justice and liberation (I am not suggesting these are mutually exclusive).  What is that thing you are moved to do?  Who are those people you are called to partner with to stand for justice?  What is that small part of the world that you and can make a difference in?   Will we take the chance?  Will we start today? 

Vik Muniz

Links to checkout:

Wasteland the Movie

Vik Muniz
NY Times Article Telling the Story of Transformation
Get Involved