2011 Vanessa Carr
The notion of journalist as "fly on the wall" — taking everything in while remaining unseen — is "a little bit of a fiction," graduate student Vanessa Carr believes. Even if one's subject becomes less self-conscious with time, "you're never completely invisible. Sometimes events unfold because of your presence with a camera," she says.
A relative newcomer to photojournalism, Carr took a crash course in the nuances of seeing and being seen while documenting the daily life of "Tree," a 49-year old woman living in San Francisco's Mission Hotel. "There are a lot of hotels here," Carr says of the Mission District, where she herself has lived for six years. "I never knew what they were or who lived there."
Four months' immersion in the cramped hallways and rooms of the city's largest single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel changed all that.
A former casting director and the mother of two grown children, Tree had landed in the Mission Hotel after quitting her psychiatric medication and becoming homeless. "We had a rapport," Carr says of their initial encounter during a week-long School of Journalism project focusing on San Francisco SROs. The two agreed to collaborate to document Tree's sometimes precarious existence at the hotel — a place animated by unfulfilled dreams and a lively trade in food, drugs, sex, companionship and cigarettes.
Carr recalls that a photography teacher at Berkeley had urged her to experiment with working exclusively with a wide-angle lens. That way, "I couldn't zoom in," she says, "but would have to literally get close to people." When she did, the results were striking: "It broke down my shyness and not wanting to bother people."
Documenting Tree's life, Carr navigated interpersonal relations and technical challenges as she sought to gather not just still photos but video and audio. Later she would add bits of music and short explanatory text and captions to help tell the story.
"Tree's round blue eyes, blonde pixie haircut, and taste for scarves, floppy hats, and the occasional rabbit fur make her look younger than her 49 years," Carr wrote. "The daughter of a preacher, Tree was raised in the Church of Christ during her childhood in Idaho. She incorporates many crosses into her bohemian style…."
Carr has been interested in visual media since high school, when she watched documentary films at art-house theaters in Cambridge, Mass. In approaching journalistic projects, she is aware of the temptation to use her camera as a "passport" to get close to others’ suffering or poverty, she says. "I'm influenced by Susan Sontag, who wrote about the photographer as class tourist."
The 27-year-old journalist is "still figuring out" how to be conscious and respectful while bearing witness to others’ lives. Carr is drawn to "getting more in-depth, getting more specific" through longer-term projects. And to "offering people the opportunity to tell a story in their own voice," with audio — as Tree does intermittently in Carr's seven-minute multimedia piece "Queen of Hearts: Tree’s Story."
"I want the light to break through," Tree says in the piece. "But right now I believe it’s the dark before the dawn…. This is the Mission Hotel. We’re invisible; we're disposable."
Seven color prints from that project caught the attention of the Dorothea Lange judges and garnered Carr the 2011 Lange fellowship.
With the prize money, she plans to do documentary work among the Burmese refugee community in Buffalo, N.Y., for inclusion in a visual trilogy on post-industrial American cities. (Carr's other two locations are Richmond, Calif. — where she has been a reporter and senior producer with the J School's Richmond Confidential project — and Detroit, Mich.)
Carr decided to turn her lens on Buffalo after witnessing a foreclosure auction in that once-bustling industrial city, now blighted by more than 20,000 vacant homes. Buffalo has a large population of refugees and immigrants from Burma, Africa and the Middle East. Many of them were there that day, bidding on properties in need of a lot of TLC, and going for as little as $500, she recalls.
"A lot of refugees are being resettled in post-industrial cities," Carr notes, where "it's hard enough for Americans to find work."
In anticipation of that project, she is educating herself about Buffalo and its Burmese community, and developing contacts with photographers there. "I would love to collaborate," she says, "with one of the Burmese refugee photojournalists living in Buffalo."
Photo Gallery
Project Proposal
Buffalo, N.Y., is shrinking. Like others Rust Belt cities, it lost its manufacturing base and—with it—more than half of its population since 1950.
But throughout the region, one community is growing: refugees. From Iraqis in Detroit to Bosnians in Utica, Afghans is Schenectady to Burmese in Buffalo, a new wave of immigration is reconstituting the working class—and the cultural landscape—of these former industrial powerhouses.
Buffalo is home to 4,000 Burmese refugees, the city's fastest growing immigrant group. They are filling vacancies on the West Side, one of the city's most blighted neighborhoods, where many homes have an "X" spray painted over their paint-curled facades, the mark for demolition. Housing is cheap but jobs are scarce, and only 10-15 percent of new arrivals speak English.
I propose a digital color photography project telling the story of the Burmese community in Buffalo. How are they surviving in a city that still has not recovered from the collapse of heavy industry thirty years ago? Is it possible to be upwardly mobile in such a place? What political and cultural traditions do they bring, and how will these shape Buffalo's future?
I shot a short documentary for nine days in Buffalo this fall. I would like to return for a month this August to profile three Burmese refugees using the fly-on-the-wall reporting skills I learned from spending four months last semester intimately profiling one woman living in a residential hotel.
This project follows a tradition of documentary photography examining social inequality in America, from Dorothea Lange's Depression-era portraiture to Milton Rogovin's forty-year chronicle of Buffalo's industrial workers. Today, the power of their photography as social critique has been muted by nostalgia for an idealized America built by honest hands and honest struggle—a narrative that excludes today's newest immigrants. I hope to restore critical power to this tradition by documenting the new faces of Buffalo's West Side, the very neighborhood Rogovin once photographed.
I have already made many contacts in Buffalo and identified fixers: Anna Falicov, who has written an ethnography of Buffalo's Burmese community, and Law Eh Soe, a recent Burmese refugee and photojournalist who chronicled the pro-democracy uprising in Burma two years ago.
The series will be printed as a book with text and packaged online as a series of audio slideshows.
Vanessa Carr
November 2010