It is undeniable the effect that a picture of a child suffering in our inner cities can have on any human being with a heartbeat. But I have begun to wonder, great devastating feats of mother nature aside, if we are not inundated with so many of these pictures that we have stopped seeing them.
Weather it be in the cities of third world countries or the third world neighborhoods of our own cities, these faces that plead to us through the lenses photojournalists can seem really far away.
A couple of years ago I started a photographic project, which I won’t bore you with, but which took me into a completely unexpected and wonderful direction. I started meeting other artists, primarily women, who in the process of trying to figure out how to best disseminate their art in today’s do-it-yourself art world encountered a need for what they did best, create.
Two of these women are Pamella Allen and Irka Mateo. They are both incredible artists in their own rights who, with the help of grants from organizations like Brooklyn Arts Council and others, take children from public schools and around the tri-borough area and provide them with art as an outlet. Some of these children have never been on a class trip in fact some of them aren’t always in class at all. .You have heard and read ad nauseam the various sordid details of the kinds of lives most of these children are subjected to, so I don’t have to rehash it here. Suffice it to say, none have an arts program in school.
The photos you see are from a program entitled The First New Yorkers where Irka and Pamella, working with the BAC Arts In Education funded by a grant awarded by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, took two classrooms from a public school in Bushwick Brooklyn to the Museum of the American Indian to see what they had been studying about in class. The trip occurred in the course of a 17 week residency designed to support a multifaceted approach to learning; how the collaboration between the Teaching Artists and the classroom teachers can enhance the curriculum. Or, in my laymen’s terms; art helps kids learn.
It is AMAZING, for sad lack of a better word, for me to watch these kids though my lens.
When they first arrive they are very rowdy, suspicious, tense, not so sure if they are going to enjoy this or give us the satisfaction of seeing that they do… then slowly their little faces start to open up and its like magic, they relax and they start acting like…well, happy kids, funny kids, smart kids, my kids, your kids.
Of course I don’t think we should stop showing true images of suffering and we should never sensor our media, but maybe if, alongside those images we give people more glimpse of children acting like our children….
I know that we know, we’re not monsters, and I know I’m not inventing the wheel but maybe we need to change it up a bit, these images that filter in and out of our subconscious.
Because probably the only real change will come when we can make that mental leap from, ‘they are just like our children’ to ‘they are all our children’ and that some of the things they are subjected to are unacceptable…baby steps.
For now there are some incredible people doing some incredible things to make a difference in these children’s lives and I feel lucky to have stumbled upon them.
For more photos of our children from the First New Yorker’s workshop click on IROQUOIS under ‘portfolios’
