I was pretty bummed Friday afternoon. Twice Ticketmaster dropped my phone call while I was about to enter in my credit card information to buy Bruce Springsteen tickets. By the time I got through to a representative the show was sold out.
Then came the first email from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council: my application to The Fund for Creative Communities had been accepted. That took the sting off the lost Springsteen tickets. Then a couple of hours later the second email arrived: I was also receiving funding from the other grant the LMCC oversees, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund Award. That’s enough to make me ask, “Bruce who?”
I’m very excited about the grants, very excited about the project. I won’t know how much money it will total until mid-February, but it will go a long way towards funding the project that I started last year called, for now, “Message Delayed.”
Here’s the concept: during the Juan Pablo Duarte Foundation Carnaval street festival on St. Nicholas Avenue in June 2011, I photographed 50 passersby, both people I knew and people I didn’t know. Each one of them posed holding a dry erase board where they had written their answer to this question: “What’s on your mind?” I did the same thing later in the summer during a festival on Dyckman Street, bringing the total number of portraits to 75.
The photographs will be printed (probably on canvas) and exhibited this summer during the Uptown Arts Stroll at the June 2 Carnaval and then for the rest of the month at the Washington Heights Business Improvement District.
This concept isn’t new. I have always been fascinated by how photography and text work together. One of my first photographic inspirations was Jim Goldberg’s “Rich and Poor” book where his subjects wrote what they thought directly on the photographs. I used that technique when completing my senior thesis in anthropology at UC Santa Cruz.
But I am introducing a couple of twists to the “Message Delayed” project. First: no one has seen these photographs, outside of the LMCC grant review committees. None of them has appeared online. These photographs, taken digitally, will only exist for public viewing as prints. The subjects will be invited to come to this year’s festival to see their portrait and read what they were thinking about a year ago. Thus the title: “Message Delayed.”
Second: I’ll set up the photo booth again during this year’s Carnaval and photograph anyone who stops by. In 2013, I’ll exhibit all the photographs from both years. The people who are photographed both years will have their photos displayed one on top of the other; you’ll be able to lift the newer photograph to see the older one behind it. In this way the project begins to simulate a real life photo album, or more precisely, a real life Facebook page (which is why I purposely asked people: “What’s on your mind.”)
One of my goals since I arrived in Northern Manhattan 13 years ago was to use photography to foster community. The place we live, Northern Manhattan, is divided along many lines: language, culture, geography, economics. My photographic projects – views from the rooftops of local buildings, portraits of local artists, “Message Delayed” – are designed to encourage people to think about where they live and who their neighbors are in a new way.
“Message Delayed” will essentially create a community out of people who simply happened to be at the same place at the same time. Once they come back to see their photograph in the show they will have the opportunity to learn what else they have in common. And if they come back year after year to have their photo taken, they will almost be like family.
At the end of the introduction to my “Northern Manhattan as Muse” exhibit, on view at NoMAA until Fri., Feb. 10, I wrote about how I came to photography through anthropology, which led directly to journalism. But after 20 years, “I can no longer see the boundaries between the art, the anthropology, and the journalism in my photography. The more these lines blur, the better.”
This project is one more step toward blurring those lines.
It’s been over eight years since I first started helping to organize the arts community in Northern Manhattan. That was before the first Uptown Arts Stroll, before the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, before it became crystal clear that there are local artists itching to showcase their work uptown and an audience hungry to enjoy it.
