Friday, September 26, 2008

Maternity Shoot in San Francisco

Congratulations to Mike and Colleen who gave birth to RoseMary and Thomas!




Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Doors of Reflection gets more press



After a year of hard work, Mrs. DelaVaughn's Pedagogy of Photography students created a collaborative installation piece that was exhibited at NYU in collaboration with World Savvy's Global Youth and Media Arts Festival.

Check out this great review of Pedagogy of Photography students work written by Dana Edell

Opening the Doors of Reflection

"One of the most powerful and richly layered art exhibits at the show is a project called "Doors of Reflections." Vivia, a vivacious 12-year-old girl from Jamaica, describes the project to me proudly. She perches on the edge of a wooden stool in the gallery, her yellow sundress glittering with sparkly sequins, and explains,

The whole concept was "doors of reflection," so it's when you hold on to a knob and you're turning it and you're thinking about what's behind you and what's going be in front of you, right? So it's like going back in time in somebody's mind and seeing where they gonna be in the future or where they are now.

The middle-school class had collected photographs from their lives and homes and created visceral collages that rippled against the broken, cracked wood of an actual door, suspended from the ceiling.

"I'm just a problem that can never be solved. I don't belong here."
"Life is too harsh for me to be able to survive yet I continue on."
"I will express myself."
"Albania is full of both beautiful and tragic memories. When I was five, the memory of seeing my aunt being shot by two drunk men hunts me & is heavy on my heart"
"Locked is what my door should be with all my secrets."

The middle-school class had collected photographs from their lives and homes and created visceral collages that rippled against the broken, cracked wood of an actual door, suspended from the ceiling.
These writings, scribbled with crayons, markers, paint and stickers, illuminate lives in which adolescent fears and insecurities are trumped by real terror and the desperate need to survive. I can't look away from the work. These kids have plunged their pens into their hearts and written with the unfiltered ink of raw emotion. Thoughts and secrets and desires are shuffled among photographs of smiling children, sepia-toned portraits of grandparents, geographies of memory, farmland, homeland and cityscape. When my gaze focuses on specifics, my eyes water, but I am at first unsure of these images as expressions of immigrant experience. Then, when I pull back and take in the entirety of the project, the conceptual theme washes over the boards.
The Immigrant Experience Leaks Through the Cracks

Boricuaz
La Boricua
such a shame
Datz all i hear
am i 2 blame
i am hizpanic
wat am i 2 do
IDK I don't have
a clue I cant
change my cul-
ture Itz not mii
fault I juz came
out diz way &
I cant go
back in
Im boricua N
proud Im
juicy NOT
Thin Im
brunette
not blond

The doors are the context, the frame and the canvas for the stories and feelings of the young artists. This poem by "Aze," is scratched into a windowpane in red and blue marker, the text hugging a photograph of a girl, body in profile looking outward into a void. Her shape is cut out and outlined in thick black: shadows that seem to be chasing her. A colored rendering of the Puerto Rican flag hangs suspended above her head. Taken alone, the image haunts, but within the collage of photos of smiling friends, doodles and magazine cutouts, its resonance sings. It is the immigrant experience � confusion, joy, pride, fear and sassiness leak through the cracks in the doorframe. As a work of art, as an expression of a young person's immigrant experience, the doors project is successful. It supplies images and media juxtaposed to each other in order to tell both individual and collective stories. As a collaboration project, it works on multiple levels. The viewer writes her own creation story of the piece, imagining a scenario where a group of 12- and 13-year-olds share scissors, glue, markers and laughter as they build the piece together. The images evoking pain and sorrow harmonize with those of survival and joy to tell a layered story of resilience.

Vivia sums up the process for me:
Through this project, everyone united with each other. Because everybody has a story to tell and everybody told their own story and now you get to see everybody's story. The fact that it's an art project really gives the person who's looking at it more in-depth features about who we are. And they get to see pictures of your life."

Monday, September 8, 2008

Goodbye Astroland

Astroland, Coney Islands famous amusement park in Brooklyn NY closed for good last night. I spent the afternoon with my Pedagogy of Photography students experiencing, documenting and celebrating it's last moments.














Saturday, September 6, 2008

POP at Astroland


Jenifer and Vivia kept trying!:)


Whooo!
Celebrating Astroland in it's last moments!
Can you find Jenifer, Vivia and me?


Going back to the Bronx.