Capturing Neighborhood Change through Photography

July / August 2009 National Building Museum Online
 

Thirty students. Thirty cameras. Twelve days. Three neighborhoods. These are the ingredients for Investigating Where We Live, a summer program created by the National Building Museum in which middle and high school students from the Washington, D.C., metro area use digital cameras to explore D.C. neighborhoods. Their goal is to design an exhibition, using photography as the main form of communication, which will offer visitors a chance to see new perspectives of D.C. through the eyes of young people.

In order to better understand how to photograph the city's urban landscape, students met with photographer Camilo José Vergara. Vergara, whose exhibition Storefront Churches is on view at the Museum through the end of November, has documented America's inner cities for the last 40 years. During a tour of his current exhibition, students learned how he first became a photographer, what motivates him, and why he focuses on change in urban environments. After listening to Vergara talk about how he documents change in neighborhoods over time and the importance of photography as one medium to capture that change, one student shared his experience on his team's neighborhood visit, "There is a lot of new and old stuff in the neighborhood [Shaw] that we visited this morning." Another student commented, "While we walked around U Street we found a building that used to be the Republic Theatre, but now it's a 7-Eleven. That's a change." 

The 2009 IWWL program examines the neighborhoods of Columbia Heights, Shaw, and the U Street Corridor in northwest Washington D.C. By meeting with Camilo José Vergara, speaking with curators of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Scurlock Studio & Black Washington: Picturing the Promise exhibition, and working alongside local photographers, students are better able to explore, document, and interpret the physical and cultural landscape of these neighborhoods. 

Major funding for Investigating Where We Live is provided by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; the Neighborhood Investment Fund, District of Columbia Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development; and The Beech Street Foundation.  Additional support for outreach programs is provided by The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; The Capital Group Companies; The Clark Charitable Foundation; the DC Children and Youth Investment Trust Corporation; The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation; and Joseph F. Horning, Jr., among others.

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