Welcoming the year of the snake
New year’s resolutions, lunar and otherwise: more sharing / posting of work from this project as I go along. Starting with today’s last minute shopping on Mott Street.
Politics, elsewhere. Inviolata Mmbwavi runs for Kenyan parliament.
As of today, Inviolata Mmbwavi is officially a candidate for Lurambi constituency for the March 4th elections in Kenya. As one of the country’s most outspoken women AIDS activists, she hopes to make history by winning the support of her rural home area after making her home in the capital for all of her adult life.
When she was first diagnosed with HIV at age 19, Mmbwavi felt ostracized and discriminated against at home; it took her moving to Nairobi to find her voice and join forces with other HIV activists to battle the stigma.
Besides her AIDS activism, however, she is inspired to run for office to ensure that the progressive women and minority rights enshrined in Kenya’s new 2010 constitution will be upheld. Women are guaranteed 1/3 representation in parliament – and like her, many women’s rights activists are gearing up for the outcome of the election and how that quota will be dealt with.
I photographed Mmbwavi last October, when she was in New York to meet supporters. Read Andy Kopsa’s article to find out more about her. You can find her facebook group (and fundraiser) here.
Street Shots / NYC group exhibit at South Street Seaport Museum
Update 01/18/2013: Thanks to all who came out to the rescheduled opening this week, and lost 5 pounds in the sweat lodge dedicated to art and street photography! Fun evening…
And here’s what my little corner of the humongous(!!) installation looked like, made pretty courtesy of J. Kalwa and filters:
Happy New Year
New portrait series for the Shriver Center
Hot off the presses, another biennial report for the Sargent Shriver Center on National Poverty Law that I was fortunate to work on with graphic designer Cliff Questel. After some brainstorming and tossing around of ideas, it was decided that opting for very simple, full page studio portraits would be the best way to tell the story of how the Shriver Center addresses key issues as diverse as budget cuts, child care, the foreclosure crisis and prisoner re-entry programs.
Meet Robert, Liliana, Elise and Mitzi:
Election Day – afternoon voting in Ohio & evening celebrations in BedStuy
Election Tuesday started out early for me, headed to Stark County, Ohio, designated by various pundits and pollsters to be a “bell weather” county that would presumably forecast the outcome of the presidential race. On a last-minute assignment for a Chilean sunday magazine, the writer and I faced a minor logistical set-back: By the time we arrived around lunch time, most people had already voted and were at work. Downtown Canton resembled the set of a zombie movie, devoid of any surviving human extras. View the rest of this entry »
Chinatown Blackout update – Knickerbocker Village
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012: Chan Yin is a home health aide who looks after 93-year-old Liang Xiushi in the apartment she shares with her husband on the 7th floor of 16 Monroe Street in Knickerbocker Village. Without electricity, she is unable to operate Ms. Liang’s hospital bed to prop her up while feeding her, or to lift her out of bed. Their apartment has been without heat, hot water or cooking gas for almost two weeks now.
Chinatown Blackout – A community rallies after Hurricane Sandy
After the lights went out in Lower Manhattan, making a decision on what area to cover in the following days wasn’t difficult. I had spent time over the past few months photographing in NYC’s Chinatown community, slowly getting to know the neighborhood and some people there.
During the four days of the black-out, the community had to made do with whatever improvised resources were at hand. Residents relied on flashlights and candles; high rise apartment buildings lost running water and elevator service, a hardship especially for the neighborhood’s many elderly residents who were stranded on the higher floors. In a linguistically insular community of large numbers of recent immigrants there was an information blackout as much as there was power failure, and many residents were left in the dark as to what city services were available and when amenities, schools and transportation might be restored. Many people in this mostly working class community work in informal and service sector jobs or run small businesses, and they were losing desperately needed income every day businesses were shuttered in the wake of the storm.
Ghosts of debates past, and present….
And now that the debates are over and we are all holding our collective breath: A look back at 2004, and a series of images that still sums up best how watching these hollowed-out spectacles makes me feel. View the rest of this entry »
A Graying Pandemic project
It’s been a busy summer! This weekend marked the final days of the Governors Island Art Fair installation of A Graying Pandemic,
a spin-off of the ongoing Graying of AIDS project.
For our participatory installation in the Global Village of the XIX International AIDS Conference – held in Washington, DC, from July 22-27, 2012 – the Graying of AIDS team (Naomi Schegloff, Viviana Peretti and myself) worked with adults age 50+ who are living with HIV/AIDS to create a series of photographic portraits and interviews, exploring what it means to be aging with the virus around the globe. View the rest of this entry »