Happy Holidays

December 24th, 2008

 

 

 

In 1946 the great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith took a photograph of his two small children as they walked down a tree -shrouded path into a sunlit clearing. The picture entitled "A Walk To Paradise Garden" was made during a period of convalescence for Smith after a shell fragment injured him during his intimate coverage of WWII. The photograph became one of the most famous ever to be made and a personal triumph for Smith as it was uncertain that he would regain sufficient use of his arm to be able to photograph again. The image is so iconic that it undoubtedly inspired my own color photograph entitled "No Child Left Behind".

I made this photograph in Troy, New York – just this past summer, August 2008. I had come out of a friend’s house, a single mother with six children, where I had been reporting for weeks. Drained from a combination of my own middle ageing body and the chaos of too many children clamoring for the too few resources of an over burdened mom, I  literally followed a couple of her little girls into the light. Dawn to the long golden rays, a power source, filtering through the trees, the allure of the Hudson River Bridge just beyond the highway and the idyllic pinkness of the children and their doll. The scene, such a contrast to the finality of apartment we had left behind.

Truth and beauty are the victories of struggle. In the New Year these photographs will be my reminder not to give up the quest for either and that they often can be found in the places where opposite worlds come together to offer brief moments of clarity and perspective. Our hope at The Raw File is that change in the coming year means reinforcing the idea that it is the duty of humans to seek and facilitate these intersections.

Love and Peace,

Brenda and Laura

 

 

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Upstate Girls-What Became of Collar City

November 3rd, 2008

 

Upstate Girls; What Became of Collar City is an ongoing documentary project that began in 2004. The roots of the epic are the coming of age stories of six young women in the post -industrial city of Troy, New York. “Upstate Girls” will be released across three platforms. A print book, feature length documentary film, and a multi-media web series that contextualize the young women’s personal stories in Troy’s important labor history will be released beginning spring of 2009. Look for updates on  www.therawfile.org and a feature article in the Spring Issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review and GEO MAGAZINE later in 2009.

I was 16 years old by the time I completed the sentence of “probation” given to me by Albany County Family Court. I wanted to get out too. I was terrified of repeating the lives of resignation that I saw being played out in every corner of my community. I left upstate New York for Florida in 1977 in the Chevy Impala of an older friend who had spent time down south a few years before. I drifted in Miami.

Married an older man who could provide me with the home that I never had, worked as a waitress, a retail clerk and even a brief stint as a bartender in a strip club. I had a propensity for drugs and alcohol that seemed to add excitement to the monotony of survival. My dreams of freedom were all but lost in the grinder of substance when I met a woman who was to become my mentor and life mother. Maureen was like no one from the neighborhood where I had grown up. She approached life unburdened and instilled in me a sense of possibility and passion for analytical thinking that was considered “impractical, if not unknowable, in my immediate family”. She traveled, loved art, read books, and valued good conversation. Through her, I eventually saw my misspent youth as a series of valuable lessons that I could bring to the classroom and an informed life. The trick was to develop a healthy enough sense of entitlement to enter the larger arenas of the life that I had envisioned since childhood. For Me, Maureen was that outside force that interrupted the predetermined course on which I felt my life would follow. She told me that the biggest obstacle that I faced was that somehow I had to overcome the message that gotten early on – which was that I had not earned my right to be here. 

I began slowly, taking classes at Broward Community College. My grades in English and a rudimentary photography course got me accepted into The Photojournalism Department at The University of Miami. I graduated in 1991 with a BS in Photo communication and a double major in Sociology.


I met “The Upstate Girls “ while on assignment for THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE in 2003.  A friend and colleague, Adrian Nicole Leblanc had completed RANDOM FAMILY, a book that was to become extremely important in both the literary and social science world. The TIMES assigned me to take photographs for an excerpt that they were running. Afternoons full of kids in paneled rooms killing time till mothers dragged in from work, brought back feelings even 20 years of Miami Sun couldn’t fade. Days spent photographing girls on Sixth Avenue in Troy collapsed the decades between my own glassed in front porch on Second Avenue, the key under the mat after school, and my new life as a sophisticated professional. I drowned. I saw all our lives.

 

 

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Support Us Through The Basement Files

March 21st, 2008

Basement Files

"In 1996, I signed a lease on the first and only place that I looked at in Brooklyn–the second-floor space over a corner store with the elevated J and Z trains running next to the bedroom window. The landlord referred to the neighborhood as East Williamsburg. The subway map said it was Bushwick, and the neighbors told me that if I crossed the street it was Bed-Sty. I had never been to Brooklyn before, so I wouldn’t have known the difference. I told myself that I was here because the rent was cheap, the ceilings were high, and there was lots of room for my two-year-old son, Simon, to run around in."

from  the book "Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood"

These are the words in the forward of my book.  These are the photos that never made it into that book. I must have edited them out on my way to " the good " stuff. I found then in my basement a few weeks ago. They made me think about how much had happened since the kids were all that little. How many were not here anymore…Pepe…Antoine…Jordan. I was reminded how much the neighborhood has changed, how big Simon has gotten and how long Andy has been part of our lives. These pictures must have seemed too ordinary to me the first time I looked at them. When i revisit them now and hear the sounds of just another day a decade ago, i am reminded of how precious these ordinary moments are. I suppose that is why I love photography.

If you too love photography and want to help The Raw File, read about The Basement Files; Support from the bottom up

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Chapter Four: Andy’s Education

December 31st, 2007

Andy's Education

 

Andy’s mother Tata became a draftee in the war on drugs the first time she went to prison for attempting to sell crack cocaine to support her own addiction. It was the ’80s and Governor Rockefeller’s response to the national climate was to stiffen prison sentences in New York State. Possession of crack cocaine could now carry a life sentence. Tata’s arrest made collateral damage of Andy’s childhood. One day, in the second grade, he returned home to the news that his mother would be gone for four years. Ten months later, chronic truancy landed Andy in the office of a Board of Education psychiatrist. "School Phobic" was the Board’s official diagnosis. Andy refused to attend classes or stay the full day in school if he did manage to get there. It was explained that this is common among children who have had trauma occur in their houses while they were absent. The doctor said "Children worry what will happen to their parents when they are not around and feel the need to stay home to protect them." Eventually Andy’s school record got him a spot in a juvenile detention facility in Upstate New York, five hours away from his family in Brooklyn. The 18 months that Andy was in the facility and the three sporadic years that he spent in New York City Public Schools account for Andy’s entire academic career. Now, at 20 years old, the resiliency that Andy has mustered after repeated tragedy is his education.

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Chapter Three: Andy & Tata

December 31st, 2007

Andy & Tata

 

Eight-year-old Andy was already a legend on Dodworth Street by the time a social worker slipped a note underneath the family’s apartment door, charging his mother, Tata, with educational neglect. Andy was the tousle-headed street kid who could jump over five people with his bike, turn an abandoned building into a shelter for a dozen wild dogs, and stand toe-to-toe with any of the savvy young drug hustlers that worked the doorway of the corner store with his mother. Tales of Tata’s escapades—her knack for eluding the narcotics squad, her ability to fake an asthma attack convincing enough to get her released from a pair of handcuffs, her refusal to live by any authority, even when it came in the form of a gun-toting supplier whose crack she had smoked instead of sold—provided Andy with a street pedigree that established him on the block before he was old enough to walk.

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Chapter Two: The Prison Interview

December 13th, 2007

Tata: The Prison Interview

 

Tata met Angel in a drug rehab after she had been arrested for dealing to support her habit. She had a long record of drug related charges, so the two-year treatment program came with a high alternative sentence of 5-10 years if she failed to complete it. Tata’s joy at having found true love at last had similar conditions. When Angel’s terminal diagnosis got him an early release from the program, Tata decided to trade years of her life for whatever time remained with Angel.

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Chapter One: Tata’s Angel

December 6th, 2007

Tata's Angle

 

Tata was already a fifteen -year veteran of the United States War on Drugs when she traded a decade of freedom to fight with her husband during the final days of his battle with liver cancer.

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 Tata's Angel

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Back on The Block

November 12th, 2007

In 1996 I moved from Miami, Florida to Brooklyn, New York to begin pursuing my Master in Photography at N.Y.U.  The education that i got came not from the lecture hall but from the streets in my new neighborhood. During the seven years that I lived on the border of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant I photographed, wrote about and made video recordings of the families on my block. The reporting resulted in a book and web publication entitled Money Power Respect: Pictures of My Neighborhood. In 2002 i bought a house less than a mile away from where the pictures where made, I began other projects but continued to photograph and film the families in Money Power Respect. The years that followed Money Power Respect publication have been critical in the lives of children on the brink of adulthood and for parents who are always dangerously close to the edge.

I now feel that Money Power Respect serves only as the introduction of my neighbors to the larger world and that the real story somehow began after the publication of the book was well underway. I felt a responsibility to document the results of the stories I began to tell in the book and the web has made possible the idea that publications no longer need to be finite.The result of continuing to record the stories over the last four years has been edited into a series of mini movies called Back on The Block.

Back on The Block is a premiere story blog on what we hope would be a new forum for community journalism. The Raw File was inspired by the need to provide open ended means of publication for long term documentary projects which might not be possible in traditional print media. We hope that these stories will provoke discussion and a way of viewing personal stories in a larger social contest. In the future The Raw File hopes to host stories by independent storytellers and producers with the passion for informing emotional intelligence.

Please subscribe to our newsletter and check the Submit Stories page if you are interested.

-Brenda Ann Kenneally

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