Lost Voices by jamesfraley

Lost Voices An Inside Look With Stephen Shames Brenda Ann Kenneally Susan Meiselas

Foreword

Stephen Shames

Brenda Ann Kenneally

Susan Meiselas

Exhibition Checklist

Stephen Shames | Cigarette | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally | Untitled | Photograph

Susan Meiselas | Prince Street Girls, 1975 | Photograph

Foreword Lost Voices, MoMA 2017 From the 1970s to the early 2000s, society became blind to parts of our country. During this time individuals seeking help were being overlooked due to overpopulation and poverty. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lost Voicesâ&#x20AC;? focuses on the use of photography as a vehicle to social change. Photography allows individuals to document their circumstances and surroundings in order to share their lives with the outside world. Through the use of photojournalism, light is shed on the not so public world and humanitarian questions become raised. This exhibition contains photographs shot in and around New York City by Stephen Shames, Susan Meiselas, and Brenda Ann Kenneally. These photographers have used their photography as an instrument in order to help

raise awareness on issues involving child poverty, race, drugs, and abuse. These photographers are not outsiders, they are members of their communities who decided to make a difference. They have used photography to directly influence their family, friends, and neighbors, giving an insight to their personal lives. This exhibit is for anyone who has ever loved or suffered. It is to show how people try to make best reguardless of the situations theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in. This book shows how people adapt, no matter what the circumstances are. This work is intended to share the voices of those who are now gone and to tell their story.

Stephen Shames SVETLANA BACHEVANOVA: How do you feel about revisiting the Bronx through your images, some taken 30 years ago? STEPHEN SHAMES: I feel nostalgic. This is a family

album. The photos bring back memories of kids who are gone and of sons who are still part of my life. While I have been living with some of these images for thirty years, I hope the photos are new and exciting to people seeing them for the first time. I hope people will reconsider their perceptions of The Bronx, see that there is tenderness, love, and family, not just brutality and drugs. SB: How did you end up shooting in the Bronx? SS: I took my first photos, at John Durniakâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s request, for

Look Magazine in 1977. Look died while I was on assignment. I continued for two decades, sometimes staying on the block for weeks at a time, sometimes visiting only once or twice a year.

SS: I took the photos Ralph Jumps and the photos of

the Claremont Boys Motorcycle Club the first day I shot there. Both are among the best photographs I ever took. I guess having such a great first day hooked me on The Bronx. I was wandering around Claremont Avenue and met Ralphie. I hung out with him, his brother Tony, and his mom. She was close to the motorcycle guys because she had brought up one of the leaders, who was an orphan. Ralph took me up to the roof and showed me how he jumped â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a proud kid showing off. The motorcycle guys took me into their clubhouse and showed me their women. I was worried about both shots for different reasons. With Ralph, there was the chance he could fall and die. With the Claremont Boys, once in their clubhouse, I was at their mercy. As a photographer, you have to go with it, trust the people you are with, know that they know their world better than you do. You have to put yourself in their hands, which is what I did in both cases.Ralph and his family moved from Claremont to Decatur. I followed them. Ralph and Tony are the key to Bronx Boys. It could not have happened without them.

SB: Do you remember the first picture you took there?

Stephen Shames | Ralph Jumps | Photograph

SB: What attracted you and what shocked you there? SS: What attracted me was the vitality of the people.

I said in my introduction, "The Bronx has a terrible beauty — stark and harsh — like the dessert. At first glance you imagine nothing can survive. Then you notice life going on all around. People adapt, survive and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes. I am attracted to survivors, to people who overcome incredible odds and harsh environments. Some of the kids in these photographs did just that. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men. What was shocking was how wild things could become and how these young people were often completely on their own, left to their own devices. That led to bad choices — in their view their only choices. The other shocking thing is their life expectancy. These young men dropped like flies while I was doing the photos. I went to many funerals. Most of the people in these photographs are not around today. They are either dead or in jail. And we let it happen. The low value we put on life is shocking to me. The things that you see in these pictures are not predestined. SB: Is your work in the Bronx more about capturing

moments of time, or an attempt to use photography as a tool for social changes? SS: My entire career as an artist and photojournalist has

been about using photography to affect social change. This set of images is no exception. However, what was different was that I did not try to create a photo essay out of these photographs. I did this

as a personal project. So I would have to say capturing moments in time was more important in The Bronx Boys series than in any of my other projects. My other photo stories have a point of view and a purpose. There was no purpose here. I was just taking photos. I found a home in The Bronx. I did not do these photos as a journalist, as an outsider telling a story. I just took photos of people I met, people who became my friends, my crew. I did not show these to many people or make serious attempts to get these photos published. In fact, I did not think any magazine would publish this work because it was not "objective". There was no beginning, middle, and end. This is personal work. That always makes it different. I just took photos I wanted to take and did not worry about what they meant. There are themes but not a coherent story. As I say in my introduction, Bronx Boys is about "the interplay between good and evil; violence and love; chaos and family are the themes but this is not a documentation. There is no 'story line'. There is only a feeling.” There is only a feeling. If you believe that most journalism is two dimensional, focusing on facts rather than the emotional world most people live in, perhaps this set of photos is both more dreamlike and more real. It is complex and layered, like life. SB: You became very close with the people you met and

photographed. Coming from very different background, how did you manage to gain their trust? SS: I don't think people care who you are or where you

come from if they like you, if they think you come as a friend who is trying to learn from their life. I try to understand the point of view of those I photograph. I embrace the lives of those I photograph. I learn from them. I listen to the music, read novels, listen to people talk, try to understand how they make sense of the world. I come as a traveler but not as a tourist. The tourist stays in his cultural bubble, sleeps in a hotel, eats American food, then gets on the tourist bus to ‘see’ things. The traveler experiences life. He eats the local food, stays with people, hangs out. I think good photographers do that and that is why we never have problems fitting into different places. I think people will trust a photographer who portrays them honestly, who does not look down on them. People know who they are. They can accept someone who comes as a friend and who shows their life, warts and all, if it is done sympathetically. Doing it sympathetically is all about the attitude you bring to your work, what you are trying to say, and why. I try to photograph from within, to take photographs that the people I am photographing see as true. In a sense, I am closer to a novelist than a journalist. Truth has layers. I am not as interested in the

facts as in revealing the emotional reality that people feel. If you can get to that level, then you are really there. But I do not pretend to be someone I am not. White people who try to act black are comic figures in the ghetto. People see through that. You have to be who you are and just try to understand and be simpatico. The greatest compliment I got was from a teen, who looked at me funny, trying to figure out who I was, then turned to me and said, "I know what you are, you're an undercover n*****." I think he was telling me he saw me as sympathetic.

SB: The Bronx boys seem to like you. They allowed you

everywhere, in their games, bedrooms, when they shot dope. It looks like there were no boundaries. The visiting photographer became brother and dad. Some of them still call you “Dad”. Tell us about those relationships? SS: I feel comfortable in The Bronx. I have been photo-

graphing in the ghetto since the 1960s, when I photographed the Panthers. Bobby Seale was like a father to me. My friend, the photographer Jeffrey Scales, who knew me back then, says that Bobby taught me "black". Bobby

taught me how to be a man — not a black man — a man. I came from an abusive family and felt like an orphan. The black community is used to abuse. People I met in the ghetto welcomed and nurtured orphans like me. Because they welcomed me, I feel a part of that community. I feel at home. The first person who mentored me was my 8th grade teacher, a black man, who took me, a lost kid, under his wing and taught me I could be a leader. I learned from him and other mentors, like Gene Roberts, the legendary editor, and my father-in-law Isaac Stoffmen. I guess these kids in the Bronx are also lost boys. They let me into their lives because I did not judge them. Many of them saw me as a father / mentor / friend. Sometimes when I was not photographing, I listened to them and helped them comprehend their confusing world. I will not mention them by name because we changed the names in the text. I got close to the youngsters I photographed. I am still in contact with a few of them. There are two kids in particular. Both are now in their 40s and have children entering college. First is Martin, whose story comprises this book's text. Martin is a supervisor in a food company on his way to higher management. Second is Poncho, who

Stephen Shames | Asleep in Car | Photograph

now owns his own business, employs a few people, and recently bought a house. His three daughters are incredible. His youngest, who is 8-years-old, started a Facebook page to raise money for L.E.A.D Uganda, the NGO I started to educate AIDS orphans and former child soldiers and train them to be leaders. With her, this has come full circle. I was mentored, I mentored her dad and he prepared her. Now it is her turn to help me.

The act of photographing, taking an interest in someone's life â&#x20AC;&#x201D; especially if society does not care a hoot about them â&#x20AC;&#x201D; can have an enormous, positive impact on someone. Plus, I gave pictures to everyone. That is how I work. I always give people their photos. I think seeing themselves, seeing how good they looked in the photo boosted their confidence.

SB: How have your images impacted the lives of the peo-

ple you met? Do you have a success story? SS: The images have not been widely published or seen, so

I don't think there is an impact from media outreach. I think the photographic relationship, the experience itself impacted lives more than the actual photos did. Photographing someone is an intense and intimate experience. You are there 24/7. You become part of their lives. You know things about them that their family does not know. Stephen Shames | Cigarette | Photograph

Stephen Shames | Bronx Boys | Photograph

Top | Stephen Shames | Young Man With Toy Gun | Photograph

Bottom | Stephen Shames | Bronx Boys | Photograph

Stephen Shames | Ralph Jumps | Photograph

Stephen Shames | Heroin | Photograph

Stephen Shames | Early In The Morning | Photograph

Top | Stephen Shames | Crack | Photograph

Bottom | Stephen Shames | Bronx Boys | Photograph

Stephen Shames | Bronx Boys | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally LAUREN SCHNEIDERMAN: When did you become

interested in photography and documenting? BRENDA ANN KENNEALLY: I became interested in

photography at 30, when I went back to school. Just prior to that I read a book about Diane Arbus and I really identified with the way she used photography to be a part of life. It said that she felt disconnected, and photography was her way of connecting. Both of my parents were disabled — my mother with a physical disability and my father with a mental and psychiatric one. I sort of found the interest and beauty within my family. At this time, much like Diane Arbus, I was looking for a way to connect to the world. These are things that got me interested in photography. LS: As a photographer, why do you think it is important

to use your photography to document? What do you think your stories show others? BK: When I first began photographing in the 80s, I was

living in Miami Beach, where I was drawn to photographing older women on a purely visual level.

Eventually I began doing journalism and I thought I was telling stories about larger social issues. What I do demands constant reflection, and years of work. This is what The Raw File is — a place for stories that never end; on-going reporting on the same people, and the same subjects long after publications have exhausted the story. So, I realized that I am doing this “journalism,” but I’m really connecting to people and trying to figure things out in my own life. I am trying to figure out why I feel separate, why there is a class structure that separates, why there is an emotional separation that goes along with class indicators, or how class indicators put people into boxes — by saying this is me and that’s them. I recognize this in everything I do, even in documenting my father, who felt very separate because of his mental illness, until he died last year. Photography became my way of belonging; it is an incredibly selfish thing. It is not altruistic, it is not me trying to change the world or trying to show all of these failing systems in America. Everything I do is about my reflections about the path in life that I have been on since birth, and my different attempts to stray from that path, and how difficult that was. Now I am raising a child and want them to be in a different place than I was and I

gotten shot. Or, the result of having a woman in prison for all these years is that we now have an unemployable middle aged woman who feels estranged from her family and is valueless at the one core thing that a woman can do, which is to be a mother and have the love of her family. Text is also extremely important because you can create your own environment, and contextualize your work in a way that can not be co-opted by the other guys. LS: What was your inspiration behind The Raw File? Why

did you think this forum needed to be created? Brenda Ann Kenneally | Untitled | Photograph

recognize the barriers of doing that. I ask myself: what do we have to do to change life for the next generation? These stories are also for the people in the photographs and videos. They are for the people who allow me to keep going back and become a part of their family. These stories are really for us. They are a very personal history that someday will be a very telling of present-day America. On a larger scale, I hope these stories will be preserved and become histories. This way, 100 years from now, as the Farm Service Administration (FSA) and as Jacob Riiss were; they will be reflective of a time and technology. As we look at photography as historical documents we also evaluate the technology that created them and the drawbacks, challenges and successes of each medium. LS: You often create multimedia pieces using photogra-

phy, audio, text and video. Why do you think it is important to combine different mediums? BK: I started using video as a way to kill two birds with

one stone since I am a crew of one when I shoot. I realized that I could use video to go back and visit the people in Money Power Respect — my Brooklyn book. I was seeing them all the time, but it became much easier to use a video camera, rather than to be in an intense still-shooting situation where you have to pick up the camera and wait for specific moments. I realized that with video, I could check in easier. I could get a real update about what was happening in their lives; like my godson Andy, or his mother when she went to prison, or when she would call me at home. I could be involved in other projects such as Upstate Girls, but not let go of my Brooklyn work. Through my multimedia project you can see certain things; such as where we should have invested in more after school resources, or if we did not send a kid to jail or if we engaged a child more, maybe he would not have

BK: I began working with producer Laura Lo Forti who

is the co-founder of The Raw File, and the driving force. Laura created The Raw File blog, Murray Cox stumbled upon the blog and volunteered to design the website that we have today, The Raw File as we know it would not be here without him. I also work with Steven Zeswitz, my co-producer, who is amazing. The Raw File is essentially beat reporting, much like back in the day when there were daily newspapers that would have one reporter on a beat, and they would go there everyday; whether it be at the social service office or the police station. They would go to all of these different places, covering one topic or situation, much like Weegee did. They would form a great rapport with people, since they would come back every single day. The Raw File was kind of made in that spirit because we are re-visiting the same person, or the same family over a long period of time. The Raw File is also a discussion forum, where viewers can discuss the social issues that one life can provoke, whether it be parenting, the over-incarceration of adolescents in certain neighborhoods, the over-involvement of child welfare as far as truancy goes, etc… Over time you have this amazing historical document that you can go back to whenever you want. LS: What stories can we find in this forum? Who is creat-

ing them? And who can contribute? BK: Currently, we have stories from Samantha Box; she is

working on a project about gay, lesbian, and transgender homeless youth on the West Side of Manhattan through an organization called Sylvia’s Place. Steven Zeswitz is my production partner. He has been working on a story about foreclosure in New Haven, Connecticut. He actually moved to New Haven to be close to his story. Emily Schiffer has been documenting an Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where she also teaches photography to the kids that live there. Anyone can submit to The Raw File; we are looking

for long-term projects. When submitting you need to have your material ready however, because producing other people’s pieces is quite difficult. Though, if there was something amazing we would produce it, at least to a sound track. LS: Where do you see the future of The Raw File? How

Basically, I have two projects — Upstate Girls and my Brooklyn neighborhood, and I will probably stick my dad’s story on The Raw File when I produce his movie. I would like the site to grow into real conversations with people, adding their own stories as I add to the stories already posted. I will go deep, but I will never really be broad with the subject matter I cover.

would you like to see it grow? BK: My dream is to have teachers in every area: English,

Social Work, Criminal Justice, Mental Health, Women’s Studies — use my book and the five multimedia pieces. I already have a request from one school. The most important part would be to have every class who uses this book contribute discussion questions, kind of like a book club. I would really like this work to be used for discussion, and to start conversations with youth who might have lives like Andy’s. I would like to get more people from the book involved, but it’s difficult because many of them feel intimidated in a classroom setting. Andy actually went to Hunter College and spoke to Laura Lo Forti’s class. Andy felt quite appreciated, but Andy’s mother would probably never go.

Brenda Ann Kenneally | The Block 1996 - 2002 | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally | Street Library, Bushwick Brooklyn 1997 | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally | Tata and Andy 1996 - 2006 | Photograph

Top | Brenda Ann Kenneally | The Block 1996 - 2002 | Photograph

Bottom | Brenda Ann Kenneally | Tata and Andy 1996 - 2006 | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally | Tata and Andy 1996 - 2006 | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally | The Block 1996 - 2002 | Photograph

Susan Meiselas BRUCE YOUNG: For Susan Meiselas the still frame is

her “point of engagement, where it all begins but not where it ends.” Her love for photography is rooted in her deeper love for exploring, understanding, and sharing cultures at the edge of change. Her first project was photographing New England carnival strippers. At the time she wasn’t really a Photographer, a professional with a capital P. She was someone with an idea, a concept born of her interest in anthropology. She discovered still photography while studying for a master’s degree in visual education at Harvard, on her way to becoming a teacher in the New York City public schools. Photography became her medium almost by default. “It could just as easily have been a compact video recorder,” she told Harvardmagazine in 2010, “if such a thing had existed at the time.” At first carnival strip show operators wouldn’t let her shoot. She stuck at it – she worked during the summer carnival season for three years – and slowly gained the trust and access she needed to fully explore and capture the complex “multiplicity of views” that fascinated her. From the start Meiselas wanted the voices of the people she was photographing to be heard. So she made audio

recordings of her interviews with the women, their bosses and even some of the patrons. “I don’t think the photograph in and of itself tells all,” she said at a 2011 lecture at Parsons The New School for Design, “I … wanted the voices of the people who are the subjects to participate and to shape our understanding of how we see them.” Carnival Strippers was first viewed as an exhibit in 1975. Although the gallery wanted a traditional show of framed pictures with captions, she wanted the interviews playing in the background as gallery viewers looked at the photos. Published as a book in 1976, Carnival Strippers got the attention of the legendary Magnum photo agency. Meiselas was invited to join. She was 27 years old. “I don’t think I realized what a big deal it was and I didn’t really know what being a professional photographer, so to speak, was going to mean,” she said later in an interview. “I sort of landed and discovered a world that I became immersed in very fast.” It was Magnum that encouraged her to cover the revolutions in Nicaragua and later El Salvador. She went at her own expense, and she still laments the magazine industry’s drift away from that time when a photographer

Susan Meiselas | Prince Street Girls, 1975 | Photograph

with an idea and some passion could get a commitment to cover a story on spec along with a bag full of film from an interested editor. That journey produced what is perhaps her best-known book, Nicaragua, in 1981. When she organized an exhibition of her pictures from that work, she again decided to defy conventional gallery form. “So I ripped up the book,” she said in the Parsons lecture. Literally. The display showed several lines of framed pictures, magazine tear sheets, galley proofs and outtakes. “I felt people didn’t know what they were missing, meaning what they weren’t seeing being in a magazine, or what the process had been to arrive at a narrative.” However, it sometimes seems as if Meiselas isn’t really a “photographer” or at least a still photographer in the traditional sense at all. She seems to approach nothing with the mentality of just making pictures. Her love for photography is rooted in her deeper love for exploring, understanding and sharing cultures at the edge of change. Often, she has done this at the sacrifice of chasing the hot story as she indicated when explaining her choice to stay in Latin America rather than rush to “Peru or Haiti or South Africa.” Speaking with The Brooklyn Rail in an extended interview in 2008 she explained why she hadn’t

chased the high profile story of Yugoslavia’s extended dissolution. “Since everyone else went there I didn’t feel I needed to be there,” she said. Later in the interview, on how she relates with the locations of her stories: “It’s a psychological violence that you put yourself through, to disrupt yourself, to uproot, throwing yourself into places where you don’t belong and you try and find a reason to be there that makes that act coherent and justified and that’s what I mean. It’s not just about pictures; it’s about the whole role.” “I still find these boundaries very blurry,” She told The Brooklyn Rail. “The differences between ethnography, photojournalism, and documentary had already been raised from time to time.” But she has slipped back and forth. “I think about my photographs as fragments of relationships,” she said at Parsons. “What I suddenly see is that there’s a whole timeline of people like me,” she explained. Again, in 2004, Meiselas returned to Nicaragua and hung billboard-sized prints of her pictures at the locations where they had been made, reminding a new generation what had happened there. And then she made a film of that … which she included with a reissue of the original book, Nicaragua.

“Am I preoccupied with whether my projects will be designated Art with a capital ‘A’ or a small ‘a’?” she asks herself in an ASX.TV interview, before reviewing her unusual choices when organizing exhibitions. “It is not easy to reinvent new contexts for images and make them matter,” she says later. “Images are generally, still, trapped in limited ghettos. As a consequence rarely do images have any kind of effect. So in a quiet way that’s why the Kurdistan project was important. The images were embraced by communities for whom the project was a meaningful process and exchange. In the broader scope this is a small thing but I do wonder just how much change images can effect. Probably not very much in the end.”

“But enough,” interviewer David Campany says. “Yes, enough to matter and want to continue making them.” After all, as she said elsewhere: “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.”

Susan Meiselas | Untitled | Photograph

Susan Meiselas | Essex Junction, 1973 | Photograph

Top | Susan Meiselas | At the playground under the Manhattan Bridge, 1976 | Photograph

Bottom | Susan Meiselas | Blood of Student, 1979 | Photograph

Top | Susan Meiselas | Pebbles, Jojo and Carol on the A Train | Photograph

Bottom | Susan Meiselas | Tina and Julia 1978 | Photograph

Top | Susan Meiselas | Carol at Rockaway Beach, 1978 | Photograph

Bottom | Susan Meiselas | Jojo and Lisa at Rockaway Beach, 1978 | Photograph

Top | Susan Meiselas | Santas in Subway, 1976 | Photograph

Bottom | Susan Meiselas | Fith Avenue, 1976 | Photograph

Exhibition Checklist Stephen Shames Ralph Jumps | Photograph

Asleep In Car | Photograph

Cigarette | Photograph

Bronx Boys | Photograph

Young Man With Toy Gun | Photograph

Bronx Boys | Photograph

Ralph Jumps | Photograph

Heroin | Photograph

Early In The Morning | Photograph

Crack | Photograph

Bronx Boys | Photograph

Brenda Ann Kenneally

Untitled | Photograph

The Block 1996-2002 | Photograph

Street Library, Bushwick Brooklyn 1997 | Photograph

Tata and Andy 1996-2996 | Photograph

The Block 1996-2002 | Photograph

Tata and Andy 1996-2996 | Photograph

The Block 1996-2002 | Photograph

Susan Meiselas

Prince Street Girls 1975 | Photograph

Untitled | Photograph

Essex Junction 1973 | Photograph

At The Playground Under The Manhattan Bridge 1976 | Photograph

Blood Of Student 1979 | Photograph

Pebbles, Jojo and Carol on the A Train 1978 | Photograph

Tina and Julia 1978 | Photograph

Carol At Rockaway Beach 1978| Photograph

Jojo And Lisa At Rockaway Beach 1978 | Photograph

Santas In Subway 1976 | Photograph

Fith Avenue 1976 | Photograph

Colophon Lost Voies, MoMA 2017 The Museum of Modern Art 11 W 52rd St, New York, NY 10019 (212) 708-9400

This exhibition catalog was designed by James Fraley for Texas State University, 2017. The book was printed at Fedex on on gloss white paper. The display type is set in Helvetica bold and the body type is set in Century Schoolbook regular. The body type is set in 8pt with 13pt leading.