Bread and Roses-Unseen America, USA (PP)
Project manager: Bread and Roses
Project title: Unseenamerica
Photography by immigrant workers and other under-represented people in the
USA.
"This is a picture of one of my co-workers in our factory. She is eating Chinese food at lunchtime. Most of us eat our lunch at our workstations. We make skirts and pants in our factory."
Photo by Bonnie Leung
Unseenamerica
"Unseenamerica is a project that gives cameras, lessons and exhibits to the scores of people who are invisible in this society. The program puts particular emphasis on immigrant groups, especially those who have been subject to bias and bias crimes (such as day labourers, migrant workers, restaurant workers and others.)"
Esther Cohen, Executive Director of Bread & Roses:
"I've always been interested in how we see, what we see, why we see what we do. Why something can be invisible until we learn to look. I work for Bread and Roses, a cultural program that's part of a union - 1199SEIU. We're a 25 year-old non-profit working people's arts organization, code words for struggling. We are always on an invisible financial cusp. We ask for money and help all the time. On occasion, help comes.
"A new camera store opened near the apartment of one of our volunteers, and she automatically went in, imagining the man who worked there might give her cameras. She hadn't put much thought into what we'd do with them. She knew we needed them. We need almost everything. He gave her l00 cameras, and we designed a program called unseenamerica, offering free 12-week photo classes with professional teachers to six different groups: migrant workers, homecare aides, building maintenance employees, garment workers and nannies. The idea is that so much of life around us remains unseen. We just don't see so many of the people who make our lives work.
"The first class begins with a big stack of popular magazines. We ask the students to find themselves, to find their pictures or their sensibilities. They don't. Then we talk about how to become more visible, how to tell the stories we want to tell, not just stories others want to hear.
"We mounted an exhibition at the Bread and Roses gallery, attached to the union headquarters, and hundreds of people came - relatives, children, many people who'd never been to an opening before. At the opening, the new photographers described their images. A migrant worker spent 12 weeks photographing chairs from every angle because she never got to sit down. A homecare aide who worked double shifts for years took a picture of her 25 year-old son's haircut, because she missed his first one, and felt sorry all these years. A Chinese garment worker, an older man in his seventies, explained that his culture taught him to photograph only happy occasions, birthday parties and weddings. His life had not been happy, so he'd never taken pictures. After a few weeks though he understood that he could photograph anything. His image, in the exhibit, was a bus full of workers who'd travelled on a snowy day to join a demonstration. He said it was his first happy picture: a cold day, and warm hearts of workers on a bus.
"Another older woman, who said she'd never spoken in public before because she never thought anyone was interested in her, described how she felt about her camera, and her pictures, "I feel like a frog who finally jumped out of a well."
"We've held over 80 classes with steelworkers, autistic adults, public workers, formerly homeless men, restaurant employees, security guards, and many others whose stories have been exhibited in public sites around the country. One day, we hope to have a very large, dynamic inclusive exhibit of unexpected pictures, unfamiliar voices, portraits we should learn to create, and to see, of this rich complex society of contradiction and surprise."
To sponsor a class, or to find out more about this project please call Esther Cohen on: 00 1 212 603 1185