After I watched the 2006 movie, “Blood Diamond”, I walked out of the theater enraged. I passionately vowed to never accept a conflict diamond when I would hopefully be proposed to one sweet day; I joined common interest groups on facebook – “Blood Diamonds are for NEVER”; I even donated a whooping five dollars towards the cause through Amnesty International.
A week later, the burning flame I felt about this awful problem died. Conflict diamonds in Africa didn’t directly affect my semi-charmed life and I ditched all my efforts. So much for that.
On April 24th when “The Soloist” is released, I want to challenge the apathetic, such as myself, to overcome this bipolar-like tendency to activate – then spectate – when confronted with a social problem. A movie about the friendship between Los Angeles Times staff writer, Steve Lopez, and a homeless man named Nathaniel Ayers, who was once a prodigious cellist at Julliard but was displaced because of a mental illness, the film will unveil the issue of homelessness that lies merely five miles from my current residence near the swanky University of Southern California.
Though we may cringe when facing the ugly flaws that exist in our backyard, the numbers do not lie: homelessness in Los Angeles is becoming an epidemic. Known as the “Homeless Capitol of the United States”, Los Angeles was ironically the residence for nearly 142,000 homeless people, 80% of whom were living unsheltered – that is, in alleys, encampments, overpasses, or doorways in 2008. Our reputation is going strong, too. USA Today recently reported that the number of people using a winter shelter program in Los Angeles jumped from 330 families in the 2007-08 winter to 620 this year – an almost doubling of displaced men, women, and children during a few months in 2009 alone. These atrocities are all occurring in our very own City of Angels.
Lopez has done a great public service through this movie by shedding light on a local problem that has for too long needed national attention. But unfortunately, we are not alone in our woes. The same USA Today report said, for instance, that this year, Seattle has seen a 40 percent increase in homelessness in its suburbs; in Miami, evictions have quadrupled, and fifty-nine percent more people made calls to a homelessness prevention hotline in Chicago. The economy has proven to be non-discriminatory as it has kicked families to the streets all across the nation.
Homelessness is on the rise. It may be scary to admit, but had life dealt us different cards, our families very well could have found ourselves in the desperate and frightening situation that so many thousands are in today. So while it is understandably difficult during these tough economic times to try to care for others when we find it hard to support ourselves, let the statistics and “The Soloist” prove that though life may seem hard for us, it could be worse.
Jimmy Carter once said, “The measure of society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens,” a saying that could not be more fitting in a time like this. Particularly during this period of national hardship, we cannot afford for apathy to override our obligations to care for those that are hurting when our nation is trying to rebuild itself.
We can collectively attempt to appease the issue of homelessness by giving a few hours of our time to volunteer at local homeless shelters. They are over capacity and need more hands to help. If you have the funds, donate to permanent supportive housing initiatives, such as the Corporation for Supportive Housing, which offer a place to live with the necessary support services that might help someone get back on their feet. At the minimum, subscribe to PATH Partner’s “LA Homeless Blog” to keep yourself informed.
It is my hope that “The Soloist” will be the catalyst for social change that is direly needed in this nation today. But while the anticipated film has already received much publicity, I fear that the golden opportunity for activism that it possesses will be overlooked, as I have done before. What “The Soloist” needs to be not is just another tear-jerking movie, but a real-life mover. We cannot settle to be audience members, merely watching human suffering on the big screen, when we could really get the real experience for free if we hopped in our cars and drove to the “bad side” of Downtown Los Angeles.
When “The Soloist” is released, activate – don’t spectate. Let us seize the opportunity to become actors in our own rights by playing the part of engaged citizens in a time when our society needs us the most.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Save Our Teachers
Growing up in the K-12 school system in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District (PVPUSD), I received an excellent education, which I attribute to my near-completion of a degree at the University of Southern California. The environment was one where I knew my success mattered to my educators. So when Governor Schwarzenegger cut $3,700,000 from the PVPUSD annual school budget in 2008 and 60 of our teachers were at risk of being given the dreaded pink slip, our community returned the favor, starting a $1.2 million fundraising campaign called “Save our Teachers” to disallow for their layoffs – because they mattered to us.
It would be nice to say that the teachers of the nearby Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were as well cared for, but the recent distribution of 9,000 pink slips has proven the opposite: education is not at the forefront of Los Angeles’s priorities. Though PVPUSD does have an advantage over LAUSD because its community is more monetarily endowed, the $1 billion that LAUSD could receive from the federal stimulus package could still be used to create jobs, not to eliminate them. The worst part of these cutbacks is that they not only decrease the quality of students’ learning environments and eliminate current teachers’ careers; they also discourage aspiring educators like myself from entering the field. Everyone loses.
Those currently at risk for being laid off are some of LAUSD’s brightest – and youngest-- teachers. Lacking tenure rights with only two years of work experience, the threat to their current jobs sends a message to recent college graduates that there is no incentive to pursue a career in education. LAUSD has thus set itself up for long-term failure by eliminating the opportunity for our new teachers - the futures of education – to make an impact on our youth – the future of our nation.
I speak on behalf of the “do-good” generation that truly wants to improve America in these most desperate of times. Those of us who have found our calling to make a difference by teaching in the communities that need us the most – not the PVPUSD’s of America, who are fortunate enough to have financial community support, but the LAUSD’s of our nation, which boast graduation rates along the likes of 44% –are finding that our dreams to enter professions that value educational progression over personal paychecks are dishearteningly difficult.
Even those who do not consider teaching as a full-time profession still look into post-graduate, short-term programs that allow us to make differences in peoples’ lives. I considered applying to Teach for America, a program that allows recent college graduates a two-year opportunity to teach in inner-city schools with the overarching goal to close America’s achievement gap. However, with cutbacks in education, it hardly seemed fair to me to take the position of people who depend on teaching as full-time careers when I would be more of a temporary band-aid to a greater educational problem. In fact, the Boston Teacher’s Union currently feels this way toward Teach for America 2009 participants as they are fighting a bitter battle of entitlement that could easily arise in Los Angeles. Sadly, because education has become a scarce resource, teachers who are at risk of being laid off have come to see such programs as threats rather than assets and improvements to America.
I have often been told not worry about my limited post-graduate career prospects, for in the midst of this economic chaos comes the opportunity for me to step up to the plate and lead America out of the mess that we are in. While this optimism is indeed inspiring, the reality is that my classmates and I literally cannot enter careers that would afford us the opportunity to put our idealism into action, and there is nothing we can do about it.
PVPUSD worked to save its teachers. It is my hope that LAUSD will follow suit, for if it does not do something to recover these jobs soon, the knowledge and energetic flame that young educators crave to share with America’s youth may burn out indefinitely – and the moral consequence will be far more detrimental than any financial crisis our country has ever seen.
It would be nice to say that the teachers of the nearby Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were as well cared for, but the recent distribution of 9,000 pink slips has proven the opposite: education is not at the forefront of Los Angeles’s priorities. Though PVPUSD does have an advantage over LAUSD because its community is more monetarily endowed, the $1 billion that LAUSD could receive from the federal stimulus package could still be used to create jobs, not to eliminate them. The worst part of these cutbacks is that they not only decrease the quality of students’ learning environments and eliminate current teachers’ careers; they also discourage aspiring educators like myself from entering the field. Everyone loses.
Those currently at risk for being laid off are some of LAUSD’s brightest – and youngest-- teachers. Lacking tenure rights with only two years of work experience, the threat to their current jobs sends a message to recent college graduates that there is no incentive to pursue a career in education. LAUSD has thus set itself up for long-term failure by eliminating the opportunity for our new teachers - the futures of education – to make an impact on our youth – the future of our nation.
I speak on behalf of the “do-good” generation that truly wants to improve America in these most desperate of times. Those of us who have found our calling to make a difference by teaching in the communities that need us the most – not the PVPUSD’s of America, who are fortunate enough to have financial community support, but the LAUSD’s of our nation, which boast graduation rates along the likes of 44% –are finding that our dreams to enter professions that value educational progression over personal paychecks are dishearteningly difficult.
Even those who do not consider teaching as a full-time profession still look into post-graduate, short-term programs that allow us to make differences in peoples’ lives. I considered applying to Teach for America, a program that allows recent college graduates a two-year opportunity to teach in inner-city schools with the overarching goal to close America’s achievement gap. However, with cutbacks in education, it hardly seemed fair to me to take the position of people who depend on teaching as full-time careers when I would be more of a temporary band-aid to a greater educational problem. In fact, the Boston Teacher’s Union currently feels this way toward Teach for America 2009 participants as they are fighting a bitter battle of entitlement that could easily arise in Los Angeles. Sadly, because education has become a scarce resource, teachers who are at risk of being laid off have come to see such programs as threats rather than assets and improvements to America.
I have often been told not worry about my limited post-graduate career prospects, for in the midst of this economic chaos comes the opportunity for me to step up to the plate and lead America out of the mess that we are in. While this optimism is indeed inspiring, the reality is that my classmates and I literally cannot enter careers that would afford us the opportunity to put our idealism into action, and there is nothing we can do about it.
PVPUSD worked to save its teachers. It is my hope that LAUSD will follow suit, for if it does not do something to recover these jobs soon, the knowledge and energetic flame that young educators crave to share with America’s youth may burn out indefinitely – and the moral consequence will be far more detrimental than any financial crisis our country has ever seen.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Does Pluralist Photography Obscure or Illuminate?
USC student Kristina Lee explores the controversies surrounding participant–photography:
Pluralist photography intends to give a voice to would-be subjects of documentation. Opposing the more traditional forms of photography – naturalist, which, through photos, portrays a seemingly neutral and value-free world, and humanist, which asserts that images of suffering can be a mode for social change, pluralist photography provides people “with the power to decide for themselves what kind of information and representation is most appropriate to capture the social, political, ethical, and psychological challenges they face” (Bleiker and Kay 151). Also known as participatory photography, self representation, citizen photojournalism, and photo empowerment, all of which encompass a wide genre of photojournalism, this essay will refer to pluralist photography as that which is the product of the impoverished and mainly the youth: the marginalized of the marginalized.
As demonstrated by the numerous classifications of photography, the ability to capture absolute truth through a single photograph is unobtainable. Objectivity is nonexistent in photography, for a picture is, as Roland Barthe affirms, “a message without a code” (Bleiker and Kay 142). Thus, any and all attempts of representation through photography are “inherently incomplete, and inevitably political” (Bleiker and Kay 141). Due to this controversial nature of representation, pluralist photography deserves to be scrutinized to the same extent as it is befittingly acclaimed.
As well-intended and inherently altruistic as the proponents for citizen photography may be, the act of handing cameras to impoverished people, who are most often youth, and allowing them to photograph their proposed realities, does not automatically erase the politics that lie behind their photographs; arguably, pluralist photography does more to obscure it. This is not to say that all pluralist photography is universally ill-intended, for many such projects have ensued with educational, activist, and rewarding results. However, to truly appreciate pluralist photography, viewers must understand that this assumed act of representing one’s own reality is a mislead notion, for there are still many other people involved in this process of self-depiction. On its website, for example, Venice Arts writes that “When you give a child a camera, you give a child a voice.” As a founding nonprofit organization that endorses participatory photography, Venice Arts’ beacon of a statement does little to recognize the caveats of such photography. In order to qualify the impact of the pictures, viewers and photographers alike should ask after reading such a statement: but who gives the child a camera? Who teaches the child how to use the camera – and what do they teach them? Of what subject matter does the child have a voice through such benevolence?
While pluralistic photography highlights self-empowerment and self-depiction, it must be understood that there are leaders of such projects who always have agendas. Of course, such motives are not usually ill-intended; for the most part, they befit the most opposite and charitable of objectives, such as using participatory photography as a way to bring awareness and thus, change, to a hard-pressed social issue such as homelessness. Though many of these projects mean well, there have been many an occasion where – knowingly or not – a lead photographer’s vision questionably goes awry and disrupts the schema beyond that of the project. A prime example of such potential power that this person (or team or NGO) has is the aftershock of the documentary “Born into Brothels,” directed by the British photojournalist, Zana Briski. Briski teaches photography to a group of children in India’s red-light district. As a result of her bond with the children and desire to give back to the community and children with whom she works, Briski takes her project one step further and attempts to enroll these children of sex workers into boarding schools. Describing “the children as ‘doomed’ in their home environment” (Michel), “Born into Brothels” and Briski came under fire for its lack of cultural relativity and insensitivity towards Sonagachi’s accepted norm.
Briski and her fellow supporters of pluralist photography have been called “neo-colonialists, do-gooders, white saviors…exploiters”, white knights, and those having a “missionary zeal” (Hubbard 12) because of such ignorant and invasive actions. Briski’s goal in her project was to empower these children and let them represent their reality through their eyes, but it was not in her jurisdiction to then interpret their voices and compare them to the western world from which she found to be normative. In her hasty attempts to show to the world the lives of these impoverished children, Briski actually positively reinforced the power struggle between the assisting and the assisted, the rich and the poor by trying to help their situations. While well-intended, Briski’s social experiment was masked by her pluralist photographic project, leaving one to question whether the term ‘pluralist photography’ is a mere scapegoat for humanist photography’s faults. It is no wonder why Julia Ballerini criticizes pluralist photography as a “charitable weapon” (Hubbard 12).
Ballerini’s oxymoron is evident in that while pluralist photography masquerades as an autonomous and self-empowering initiative, many times the would-be subjects are taught the basic techniques of shooting pictures and are guided as to what they should be taking photos of, proving the importance of a mentor (leader of the project) to the consequential outcome of the photographs, including their saleablity and global outreach. In short, assuming that one of the main goals of a project is to reach a larger audience and gain support for a cause, the purity of pluralist photography will always be tainted with the opinions of a professional photographer, be it in the beginning stages of the project or in the post stages. For example, in a 2007 Venice Arts project in Mozambique, Africa, orphans with HIV/AIDS produced more than 13,000 images, 12,000 of which were eliminated in preparing for its exhibition. The deletion of the majority of these images was “not difficult…as they…did not adequately tell the story about the everyday lives of kids orphaned by HIV” (Hubbard 20). Obviously space was a constraint for the exhibit, but it is interesting to note how the professional photographers, in the end, got the final say in defining the childrens’ lives through their selection and editing powers.
Pluralist photography has many good intentions, and it should continue to be in practice. While there is a plethora of other points that address the controversy behind self empowerment, viewers need to be cognizant and aware that hierarchies behind such seemingly raw and untouched exhibits exist. They should not be passive in accepting the motives behind pluralist projects without question, nor should they be blind to its necessary but impactful molding by professionals. Pluralist photography, in its rawest of forms, is the exertion of a subjective power over the subjective voice.
Works Cited:
Bleiker, Roland, and Amy Kay. “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist
Photography and Local Empowerment.” International Studies Association (2007).
Hubbard, James. “Shooting Back: Photographic Empowerment and Participatory
Photography .” 2007. 5 Mar 2009 .
Michel, Frann. “”Born into Brothels” Controversy.” Solidarity ATC 117July – August
2005 5 Mar 2009 .
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