Developing Lives is a participatory photography project where residents living in New York City housing developments administered by The New York City Housing Authority are provided with simple cameras and educational-training workshops to go out and document their day-to-day lives.
Developing Lives was created to offer an alternative narrative to a widely-held negative image of daily life in public housing developments. Public housing residents are most often on the other side of the camera lens, Developing Lives turns that paradigm on its head.
The goal of Developing Lives is to provide NYCHA residents the opportunity to capture, share, tell and preserve the stories of their lives. The project was piloted at the Manhattanville Houses in Harlem in the Fall of 2010, with some 20 participants, equally divided between seniors and children.
Cameras and a dozen photography and writing workshops were provided separately to both children and seniors, providing the means to create a story of daily life in pictures and words.
The result is collection of some 40 photographs and hand-written captions that capture the beauty and richness of the ordinary, work-a-day daily life of New Yorkers.
It is a visual and oral history of daily life that effectively, without being heavy-handed, counters many popular misconceptions of life in public housing. The attached full page New York Daily News piece demonstrates that the truer aspects of daily life in public housing can garner the attention of the broader public, in stark contrast to the usual coverage. For example, a recent Hollywood film “Brooklyn’s Finest” starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke is set in the backdrop of a public housing development in Brooklyn that one reviewer described as “Bagdad on a bad day.”
The program was judged so successful by New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that it has since been expanded to include the Ft. Independence in the Bronx, the Red Hook houses in Brooklyn and The Amsterdam Houses (in the shadow of the klieg lights of Lincoln Center) in Manhattan .
The Developing Lives program also led to the creation of the studionycha.org website, showcasing the richness of all creative life under NYCHA’s purview, involving some 635,000 New Yorkers, a population rivaling Boston. Public housing developments account for almost eight percent of the city’s population and are represented in virtually every neighborhood – quite a talent pool, but largely invisible.
Private sector partners Dell Computer, one of America’s most admired American corporations, donated laptop computers to support the program, Kodak donated over 300 cameras and Duggal Visual Solutions, a premier American imaging studio (with a client-list that includes MOMA, The Whitney, and The Smithsonian, along with many Fortune 500 corporations), provided all lab work at cost.
New York Daily News, “Glimpses Into Their Lives,” by Tuan Nguyen, March 18, 2011 “Grassroots photography gives participants the means to express their challenges, hopes, fears and dreams more directly” said George Carrano, once the driving force behind the move from the token to the MetroCard a decade ago.”
See Developing Lives for more information on the project.
