Best of Brownsville Photo Project
How might youth change the way the public describes their stigmatized neighborhood?
For the Center for Justice Innovation, Brownsville Community Justice Center. Funded in part by IOBY, in cooperation with New York City Department of Transportation Arts
What if seeing a neighborhood differently could change public perspective about that neighborhood?
Youth living in Brownsville, Brooklyn grow up hearing the name of their neighborhood in the news as a dangerous and stigmatized place to live. Their lived experience were quite different, but these perspectives weren’t amplified loud enough for the residents outside the neighborhood to know or believe in them.
In a dual effort to build creative leadership skills in youth engaged in programs at the Brownsville Community Justice Center, and to surface a new perspective of the neighborhood that could inform future placemaking projects, we created the Best of Brownsville Photo Project.
We kicked off the youth workshop with prompts to help bring the room together in one shared vision. After this surfaced what was on peoples minds, I had them try pitching each other their ideas, and responding with an iterated idea. This established a collaborative approach and proved that all ideas had the potential to be great with a little development through critique and iteration.
Then we hit the equipment, getting to know the basic properties of DSLR cameras, light bounces and tripods.
Before getting outside we built a shooting list. Where would we go? Who would we talk to? How to we stay respectful of the people in front of our lenses?
Once a good number of images were captured we practiced curation. Which images would we include in a collection and why? How would they be displayed?
We finalized a layout and put the assets into production, and the final product was their vision brought to life. Then we hit a wrinkle.
The photo team had the thesis that the locations of the images wouldn’t be familiar to the people viewing the work, so they had the idea to include a map of where each photo was taken.
The night after the photos were installed in gleaming, new kiosks, the solar powered lights were on and everything looked great to the team. However, the next day we saw a post on Twitter that the projects was a sign that gentrification was coming to the neighborhood. The map feature was specifically called out as a sign that the project was created by people from outside the neighborhood. The proposition that a viewer would need navigational help in Brownsville meant the creators of the project were not from the neighborhood.
We invited the owner of the Twitter account into the studio, and he was surprised to learn that it was actually neighborhood youth behind the project. We took quick action and pivoted toward focusing on the “who” of the work rather than the “where”, and replaced the map with a new image.
The results of this work kicked off an all-hands meeting to ask how the aesthetics of change would be shaped in a neighborhood where all change could mean a dangerous economic shift in an historically marginalized neighborhood. This was a new question that is still in the process of being answered today.
How did the project go viral?
