Picture the Change

MISSION & GOALS

This photography group is dedicated to images that portray, celebrate, and illuminate social change and the people making it in and around Boston, MA. Photographers of any age or experience may join to submit images or make comments. Looking ahead, the organizers of this project hope it will engage a wide array of partners in a long term, city-wide project of youth development and community building through documentary photography and video.

PARTICIPATION

To participate in this group, send an email to Adam Shyevitch at avitch “at” gmail.com. I will reply with an invitation to join and instructions for submitting images. Time permitting; I am available to discuss this project and how to submit images in person, especially for youth and community groups. If you wish to schedule such a meeting, please indicate so in your email.

INSPIRATION

Here are a few inspiring resources:

FiftyCrows Social Change Photography: www.fiftycrows.org/;
Collectivelens: www.collectivelens.com;
The Child Labor Project: www.childlaborphotoproject.org;
Photovoice: www.photovoice.com/;
MediaStorm: mediastorm.org/;
PBS American Photography Series: www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/features/social_essa...;
Blue Earth Alliance: www.blueearth.org/;
Citizen Shift: http://citizen.nfb.ca/; and,
Lou Jones, Boston based photographer, Final Exposure project: fotojones.com/.

BACKGROUND

Since the early 1960s, at least, the visual vocabulary of social change has been dominated by images of massive, popular demonstration. Think of the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the woman’s movement, and the gay rights movement and such iconic, scene filling images are easy to conjure up. More recently though, such public events have failed to capture the public imagination or produce visual icons similar to those of the March on Washington, the March on the Pentagon, the ERA rallies, or the AIDS quilt. If anything, the imagery we associate with such mass movements has been co-opted by political consultants and commercial advertisers. Such images now smack of stagecraft and artifice, rather than authenticity and grassroots power.

Yet the hard work of social change continues all around us, every day, and if anything it is now more sophisticated and results oriented than ever. Instead of mass protest, we now have social networking websites, meeting rooms plastered with sticky notes, class rooms full of English language learners, organic farms in the heart of the city, music studios catering to positive hip-hop, laboratories dedicated to clean energy, socially responsible businesses, and youth workers reaching out to the dropped out and disengaged.

The change agents populating these scenes come in all sizes, ages, hues, and languages. They include students, lawyers, affordable housing developers, alt-ed teachers, mentors, mechanical engineers, mass-transit planners, investors, and others that are changing lives and changing their communities without participating in mass, public displays.

These people, and the issues they labor over, constitute the best of our present and the greatest hope for our future. Yet they and their work are often invisible to each other and the region as a whole. This project seeks to help end that isolation and fill our collective imagination with a rich array of iconic, heroic, and inspiring images to rival those made during the previous era of demonstration.