Been so busy with other work lately that I’ve found myself with quite a backlog of material to share from recent weeks. The easiest pieces to check off are the bits that have been published, including this shoot of a young Colorado girl who is one of tens of thousands of immigrant-children who stand to be positively impacted by the passage of the federal DREAM Act this fall. The Act comes before both chambers of Congress and essentially affords children of ‘good moral character’ who have been in the United States for more than five years and who have graduated from an American high school a path towards permanent residency. Their residency hinges on completion of either college education or military service.
For immigrants with the academic credentials to attend college, the DREAM Act affords them the opportunity for in-state tuition as well as federal student loans (two things currently unavailable under federal law). The biggest tragedy of the status quo is that an estimated 65,000 immigrant-students graduate high school each year and are unable to attend college. In a twist of unintended consequences, these intelligent, assimilated young men and women remain in the United States as part of a hidden underclass of English-speaking, Americanized, undocumented immigrants.
The thing that is particularly challenging about the Act is how contentious this issue is. Of all proposed immigration legislation, this is a no-brainer. As opponents to immigration reform are keen to remind us, many undocumented immigrants have made the journey to the United States of their own volition, knowingly broaching the laws of the United States in doing so; their children, however, have not. The Act, in its essence, gives a no-fault waiver to children who had no say in how they entered the United States and offers society the ability to harness the talent and enthusiasm that would otherwise go wasted.
The Act was also part of the focus of Luceo’s recent group project, Still Hoping, available here: www.stillhoping.com
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This project started by accident when friend and fellow photographer Michael Rubenstein loaned me a Polaroid back for a Holga camera in 2007. Ten frames later I was sold. The Polaroid brings two photographic methods that are seemingly at odds with each other together into one format. You get the immediacy of digital with the tangible, ’share-ability’ of film. A few days after borrowing Rubenstein’s back, I returned to Colorado and bought my first ten dollar Land Camera, a relatively obsolete Polaroid with limited control and a cost-prohibitive cap on how much film I could actually shoot. Now priced at over a dollar a frame, the format forces a judicious approach to making frames, something that the bottomless 32 gig digital cards seem to undermine. Listen to the clicks on the tape of any news conference and you will, no doubt, hear photographers pushing the limits of 24 frames-per-second, a method of shooting so rapid and oblivious as to make the process closer to shooting a movie than a still frame.
Since 2007, the camera has gone with me almost everywhere I’ve been, from my next door neighbor’s living room after his open-heart surgery to Obama’s inauguration. Until earlier this year, I’d been looking at all these different events as isolated series of images; recently, it’s become obvious that there is a bigger tale of Americana at hand in the thread that winds through all of the photographs. NPR’s Claire O’Neill recently helped me put together an edit of this work-in-progress that gets at this. I’m very happy with her final edit and even happier that she’s taken the time to share it on NPR’s blog, The Picture Show. Please have a look for yourself and feel free to revisit my website in the coming weeks. I’m working on a comprehensive edit of this work that will bring all the Polaroid galleries into one, bigger grouping of pictures.
I’m pleased to have had two photographs included in American Photography 25’s ‘Chosen’ images. Both pulled from bigger projects –one taken on the floor of the Democratic National Convention moments after Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency and another excerpted from the Gun Culture U.S.A. work. Also included in this year’s selection of images is work from fellow Luceo photographer Matt Eich.
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In the end the only thing left was the trash blowing around in the dust of the National Mall, the final scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Empty bottles, shredded newspaper, chairs, mittens, food scraps, things discarded along the way by the crowd. It was as if something had exploded, a giant trash compactor burst, its contents carried aloft in the frigid, winter air. To each side of the dusty strip, the stoic sentries of the old guard stood watch, unmoved, their classical colonnades and wide marble steps almost indifferent to the wasteland left behind by the departed people.
Come tomorrow, the trash will be gone and the political machine, no doubt, will go on as it has always done, unflinching, unrepentant, and from behind the doors of those stone buildings.
But out on the mall, in the steerage of our nation, the explosion was real. Our culture rumbled forward a bit, like a fault running through the earth, the slow motion of the bigger swell inched to tipping point and, with the 35 words it took for Barack Obama to be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president, everything changed.
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Polaroids from the National Mall during the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president.
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Polaroids taken around the U Street corridor. Washington, DC.
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Did a little wandering around U Street today, right below Howard University. U Street has been described as the soul of DC, the heart of black nightlife, a corridor cutting an east-west path across the center of the city peppered with restaurants, bars, and clubs. At the intersection of 14th and U, just below Howard University, Shepard Fairey, the artist behind the iconic blue and red Obama print, has created an installment which draws crowds of people looking to have their pictures taken in front of the giant Obama print. Up 14th, just below Howard, I found Omar Bah, 6, the son of immigrants from Guinea and Morocco, waiving from behind an Obama mask to crowds passing by his parents’ restaurant. Took a handful of Polaroids and a few color photographs before wandering back towards my spot on the floor in Columbia Heights. Initially came back with the intention of going back out to shoot some more in the evening. After a few weeks on the road and faced with the prospect of a pre-dawn morning tomorrow, I think I’m going to call it a day and refocus myself for the main event.
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From the Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial this afternoon. Polaroids from the same event below. More to follow tomorrow.
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