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Lincoln Memorial Women

So I’m a klutz. But I do it big. A few weeks ago, I was preparing to leave Washington DC by going out with a good friend of mine who also loves photography and architecture to take some photos of the DC monuments.

The MLK Stance

We walked all around the Mall, hitting all the big monuments including the new MLK during the day. But we figured, it’d look more dramatic at night, so we walked all the way around the basin, to the Jefferson to loop back.

Jefferson Dusk

I tell my friend E this story as we walk about this weird dream I had the night before where my Dad kidnaps me and makes me throw my iPhone in water. [I dropped an iPhone accidentally in the toilet a few years ago and am now a bit irrational about it falling in water again.]

FDR Memorial Fireside Chat

In between, is the FDR memorial, which I’d never seen before. It’s relatively new and not as famous. But really cool, especially at night, because it’s a serious of organic fountains surrounded by these rock formations and statues of folks in breadlines and other dramatic poses.

On the walls are all these FDR quotes, etched into the rock like commandments. So we got really into trying to capture this mood, of strong words and strong belief in country and supporting the common man….we split up.

I got really into trying to capture just the words “I HATE WAR” on one of the walls. I’m all close up, crouching down, backing up, with my digital SLR. I get so into it, I’m not paying attention at all that I’m alone and where I am. I think I’ve got a good shot but I need it a little wider. I back up. I back up, ass first, down into a 3 ft deep part of the beautiful rock formation fountain.

I fall in, up to my neck in rushing water.

Luckily, I’m smart enough to keep one arm, holding my camera, out of the water. I guffaw and squeal. No one comes. I climb out of the fountain, soaked, and realize, my phone is in my bag over my shoulder. I dump all my shit out on the ground looking for my phone. My friend E finally shows up, says all he heard was me guffawing and says, “Wait, why are you wet?” I say “I fell into the fountain dude, but where the hell is my phone?” He says, “In your front pocket”. And there it was.

It actually was fine, but I had to go in the park bathroom, strip down to my undies, and wring out my jeans and tank top and try to dry them in the oldest hand dryer I’ve ever seen. I am never approached by any staff of the park.

We then have to walk like 2 miles back to the downtown to catch the train, me soaked and him laughing at the fact that I can’t touch anything to myself so I’m walkin like a zombie and shivering.  We stop at MLK Memorial again, I manage to get a few incredible shots, even though every time I kneel or crouch, my jeans constrict and drip.  I get to the train, say goodbye to E, and my phone starts working again. I am that soaked person on the train, smelling a bit of wet dog, on a perfectly dry night.

So I tweet to the world that I hate war, but I hate dark fountains more.

After my unintentional dip in FDR memorial fountain

“I talk a LOT and sometimes that’s how I communicate.  But often I feel like I express myself better through a photograph.”

I do a lot of icebreakers, both leading and participating but sometimes they still work on me.  I did one a few months ago with a group of close colleagues in the Digital Connectors group at One Economy, where I had to admit something they might still not know about me.  I didn’t think about it much, but ended up confessing the above statement.

It was a weird but genuine realization.  Even after writing a ridiculously long masters thesis and blogging as part of every one of my jobs for the last six years, there’s definitely been instances when I’ve used the role of photographer to get intimate entry into interactions, such as friend’s weddings, birthday parties, digital media trainings, and community happenings.  I like to get really close, to lie on the ground, to say nothing and stay really still so as not to disturb or alert a subject.  It gives me an excuse to stare impolitely at people, places, and things that make me curious or are ridiculous or I can’t explain with words.

In my days of nannying and babysitting, I used the camera to preserve a look a kid can give you that you can’t explain or a burst of energy that just begs to be captured.  In the past year, I’ve used my camera to document faces expressing diversity, confusion, wonder and growing solidarity that was the 12 1Institute Digital Connectors instructor train-the-trainers.  In the past couples weeks away from this work, I’ve returned to trying to capture a sense of place and reflection, taking advantage of the scenes I sit in to try and contemplate next steps.  Instead of documenting when others discover learning and community, I’m asking where do I find knowledge and place for myself.   It’s a cycle of watching and meditation I’ve come to value.

Here’s some notable expressions from past to present.

[This post was first published on MIT Colab Radio blog, as part of the Media Mindfulness series]

This spring, I rode Boston’s #66 bus with a camera, an audio recorder and a gaggle of ten to sixteen-year-olds.  Why?  To jump on a unique chance to use photography as a reflective tool for investigating what makes neighborhoods tick.

A group of staff and volunteers encouraged these youth to use their new critical photographic eyes, honed during a fifteen-week training institute, to document and compare two neighborhood centers in Boston.  Each youth, in his own way, formed a new definition for photojournalist and activist.  These students are part of the Boston based international non-profit Peace in Focus.  Founded in 2007, the organization aims to create social change by engaging youth in a dialogue about peace in their own lives and their communities and giving them the critical photojournalism skills to become local, place-based voices for change.

After four four to six-hour outings, the youth decided to produce a collaborative essay of photographic pairs, highlighting both visual and attitudinal similarities and differences in the two corners.  These photos will become part of the citizen media displaying on the storefront screens of the Knight Foundation funded public art project called Virtual Street Corners, which seeks to break down the divide and distance between two very diverse communities with significant historical connections: Coolidge Corner in Brookline, and Dudley Square in Roxbury.

John Ewing, the Virtual Street Corner’s creator, noted in a PBS IDEAS Lab blog post:

“The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class…It is my goal…to inspire or provoke people into having more involved conversations and exchanges. I’d even like to see people travel from one location to the other. Despite it being a 15-minute bus ride between these two neighborhoods, it is amazing how rarely this happens.”

Here’s a video version of the youths’ collective photo essay, entitled “Our Journey to the Corners,” also featured in an exhibit at the USES Harriett Tubman House in Roxbury, where they held their Saturday training sessions.  All the photographs that appear in this short movie were captured by Peace in Focus youth participants, showing a mix of shots from Coolidge Corner on the left and Dudley Square on the right.  The audio you hear is pulled from interviews the youth did with storeowners and randomly recorded during the bus rides.

Voices heard include:

• Danielle Martin, PiF Instructor
• Dounia, youth participant
• Jumaada, owner of Nubian Notion, Dudley Sq
• Ethel Weis, owner of Irvings Toy & Card Shop, Coolidge Corner
• Khadijah, youth participant
• Willy, the 66 Bus Blues Man

Post by Danielle Martin.

As I sat in a meeting today at the Community Innovators Lab, where I volunteered to help with brainstorm low-cost ways to create interesting content for their Co-Lab Radio blog, I realized I’ve been a bad participatory media advocate.  Because I haven’t blogged myself forever.  I blame Twitter and Facebook, where I spew updates to a very select audience of friends who I assume want to hear 140 characters of what I’m thinking.

At the moment I am many things, but none of them is a full-time employee in my field.  Sometimes, I’m a well-trained temporary nanny for sick or childcare-challenged kids for the Parents in a Pinch agency.  I’m getting really good at reading A Snowy Day, making floor puzzles into teamwork exercises, making horror movies about attacking lemons, catching little one’s who fall over, and using non-verbal signals to know when someone needs the bathroom (a life skill I suspect to transferable to many situations, unfortunately).

Other times, I’m a consultant for my ol’ boss Thaddeus Miles and the Neighborhood Networks National Consortium.  I’ve managed to get my other ol’ pals at the Transmission Project involved in the design of a national program for local housing technology center support.  We’re visioning a strategy for an application to the mysterious second round of the NTIA/RUS federal broadband stimulus funding.  I’m getting to use my fancy planning school buzz words like “human infrastructure” and “community anchor institutions,” draw complicated network diagrams with little people icons, and use Twitter,  Google Alerts, and Delicous to predict how the first round awards will shake out.

A couple mornings a week, I’m a contributor to a new curriculum and outreach strategy for my ol’ organizing course friend Kyle Dietrich’s new non-profit, Peace in Focus.  In coffeeshops all over Boston and Cambridge (because they don’t have office space yet), I’m learning about peace-building techniques and offering my insight on how to use digital media tools like photography to encourage youth activism.  And using my brandy new graduation present, a digital SLR camera.  I’m getting good at purging my cynicism about Boston’s youth media programs, thinking about youth art as an ends and not just a means, and also how to drink decaf.

Finally, I’m ghosting around the MIT Media Lab again, at first just to hang out with my old Computer Clubhouse mentor, Leo Burd and reminisce about the days of Young Activist Network.  Fortunately, some very cool ideas are flowing, thanks to a new working group in the Center for Future Civic Media, around both tools and techniques for using mapping and mobile phones to engage youth more in reflection on and re-appropriation of urban spaces.  I’m getting good at learning about Jerusalem 2050 Media Barrios, plotting the creation of a City Department of Play, and eating free lunch on C4FCM.

Oh and somewhere in there I’m sending out resumes and woefully poking at anyone who’ll talk to me about possibilities for full-time employment.

As the temperature drops enough to remind me I hate New England weather and the pounds of butter fill the fridge in anticipation of cookie baking, I continue to scheme with old friends on how to do some interesting media and community building work to fuel my escape from being a nanny with a masters degree from MIT.  I get to relax in Rhodey, eat my own turkey meat pie, then fly off to New Orleans to see how my new sister-in-law and brother celebrate a new year arriving.

I hope you get whatever you wish from from Mr. Claus and we all get to feel a breath of fresh, economically stimulated new horizon next year.

Here’s few of the photos I took as a volunteer mentor on a day field trip around Boston with three Peace in Focus youth participants and photographer and workshop supporter, Thaddeus Miles. This community mapping outing was part of a two-week workshop on using photography as a tool for conflict resolution and youth voice, held at Madison Park Village housing development in Roxbury and Northeastern University. Check out the youth’s photo’s on a map on Flickr or the group’s blog at http://peaceinfocus.blogspot.com/

Through collaborative photography and leadership training programs, Peace in Focus provides low-income youth around the world with innovative tools to transform conflict and advocate for social change in their communities. More about Peace in Focus at www.peaceinfocus.org

An MIT Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning course (that I’m auditing), entitled Media Technology and Community Building, along with progressive community members, has been meeting twice weekly with a core group of Framingham youth and community activists since April 7th, 2009. The class has been helping the youth to analyze and activate their own social networks, both through classic mechanism and using new media technologies such as websites, cell phones, and user-created audio and video. Using these newly obtained skills the youth were challenged to activate their networks, to mobilize their peers, friends, and community to participate in a game on May 9th, 2009.

The game, called Snap Shot Framingham, featured youth-generated photographs which will be used to create a website that encouraged participants to explore their expressions of Downtown Framingham. In response to prompts given by the MIT class and community members, 4 teams of 3 or 4 youth, armed with digital cameras, spread throughout the downtown area taking pictures on a clue-based treasure hunt. Afterward, the photos were judged on creativity and composition, then teams discussed the significance of being involved as actors for change in the Framingham community. Lunch was sponsored by local businesses of the FBA. The overall purpose of the game was to empower the young adults of Framingham to become actors of change in their community, creating an awareness of the social and economic concerns facing the revitalization of the downtown area, using new media as a tool.

Check out the final photos at http://framinghamgame.ning.com/.

Find more photos like this on Framingham Game

I finished up a rough draft of just the imagery of my final essay movies without adding the sound, but the narratives significantly changed as I listened to the audio of the youth and from some short video I had captured from the Lawrence Community Works opening. I decided to use iMovie to keep it simple, rather than try to recreate standard effects in Final Cut. The “past” and “future” obviously had less photos and good audio, but I improvised when I could. When I was ordering the photos and thinking of movement and transition, I really started to hone in on recreating the movement of walking through the spaces, as well as using very deliberate points in photos for zooming and panning.

After the rough draft, I was hesitant to add the audio. I was afraid the voices might dominate over the photos and take away from the photos speaking the narrative themselves. But as I added the audio, the way I approached displaying and moving the photos changed quite a bit. I got back to the creative process I highly enjoy about making these types of “digital stories” – that it’s not just editing video but creating the aspects of visual and audio yourself, so the real control of the message is more in my hands as the author.

While the audio editing took FOREVER using Audacity, finding the right music took even longer. Again, I was apprehensive about adding music (yet another layer of meaning) but I felt like there’d be too many holes in sound between the voices. I started on a search for music typical of the time periods I was shooting for in each piece, but I moved on quickly to just searching for moods. I stuck to finding copyright free or Creative Commons licensed tunes so the search took hours.

In the end, I enjoyed making the rollover collages for the landing page the most. I loved that I could recreate all the aspects that stood out from my photos and experience trying to capture Lawrence in one 2D frame.

I have to admit, I procrastinated a bit around building the rough draft of my final photo essays.  I had all the pieces (in fact, too many pieces) and ideas, but I felt like I was back in high school again, facing down the insurmountable beast of a final paper of which I had too much I wanted to say.  Usually, once I get into working, it flows easily once I get started but it’s taking that first leap.  With this project, the themes I wanted to cover and the enigma that is Lawrence’s identity seemed like a black hole, that I’ve circling around like a hesitant but curious animal.

Like a bit of divine providence, a spark of motivation fell in my lap.  Fellow MIT@Lawrence researcher Anne Schwieger asked if I wanted to help out with a day of workshops at MIT she was planning for a group of Lawrence middle school youth.  As you may remember, working with youth doing media and technology projects is one of my favorite things to do.  SO, I had all these photography books out from the library, cameras available from department, and hundreds of my own photos printed out in color…all that easily equals a digital photography workshop.

Because of bus delays, I ended up with the same group of youth all day.  I walked them through a condensed version of how to look at photos of landscape, thinking about composition but also about language and stories they tell.  Then I spread out all my little photos on the table and asked “What do you think? Did I capture Lawrence?”  Many of them recognized the places I photographed but said I missed the right spots.  One boy was amazed that I had captured the gas station by his house when the gas prices were so much lower.  One other girl was adamant that I should have taken photos of the library.  And yes, a few boys sat back and refused to identify ANY photos (mine or from the books of Callahan, Lange, and Vergara) that were interesting.  I had them pick one, tape it up on the white board, and tell me a little about what they liked/disliked about it (a mini critique was born).

I quietly took out my audio recorder and hit record.  The youth realized it was on, protested a bit, then tried out their singing voices to watch the levels change.  And then I asked them to talk about Lawrence as a place, to describe how the places and characters in my photos showed the Lawrence that’s in their mind’s eye.  They spoke, upon my prompting, about how they consider the past of Lawrence, namely the mills, in terms of what they see today and what they hope for in the future.

After lunch, we took the cameras and I challenged them to capture the landscape of MIT.  The youth were exuberant to get out of buildings, to run around the lawn, to sit in a classroom, to see the Stata building and sit inside the Media Lab.  We tried to look at most of the photos before they boarded the buses for home and I was amazed.  Yes, there were posed photos of themselves and silly snapshots of MIT students, but there were also snippets of where I spent most days from a very different angle.

And I realized I had my new storylines for my essay.