Photography
I'm proposing a talk at SXSW EDU 2023 called "Designing Innovative Multimedia Programs for K-12" to introduce the implementation of multimedia programs to foster students' entrepreneurial mindset through inclusive filmmaking practices. You can now vote for my PanelPicker idea through Sunday, August 21.
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Going out with my camera on New York City’s streets these days transports me to the 1970s. When we think about New York City during the seventies, imagery comes to mind of a city undergoing unparalleled transformation fueled by economic collapse and rampant crime. We idealize it as a harsh time for the city but a terrific environment for the emergence of counter culture movements and creativity which has given the city the recognition and name that it has today. While John Cassavetes was taking advantage of this magnificent and contradictory natural set creating films such as Gloria, a new generation of would-be rock stars, artists, dancers, and actors freely walked the streets, squatted, or paid almost no rent.
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Last Wednesday I was walking the streets of Washington DC armed with my camera on my way to the White House. I was following the protests that for more than 10 days have been marching for justice for George Floyd, a Black man who died after officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he was handcuffed on the ground, shouting that he couldn’t breathe. I was waiting for the traffic light to change on the corner of Constitution Avenue and 15th Street when I ran into 3 young women holding signs that read “If You Are Neutral In Situations of Injustice, You Have Chosen the Side of the Oppressor,” “End Police Brutality, Black Lives Matter, No Justice, No Peace!” An African-American driver shouted to the girls “Yeah! Black Lives Matter!” “Shut up! All Lives Matter!” the Black woman sitting in the front snapped at him while smiling at me. But let’s be honest, all lives matter? Of course, but not until Black lives matter.
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By Pablo Herrera (This article was first published by Colectivo Piloto on May 12, 2020)
I first came to New York City in 2011 to work in the documentary “The Building of A Community” commissioned by the “Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space”, a cultural institution which chronicles the East Village community’s history of grassroots action. The documentary examined the social transformation of the Lower East Side of Manhattan where activists, artists, historians and political representatives describe the neighborhood, the squatters, the community gardens and explain the struggle to save them. For me, it represented a singular way to discover New York City. Let’s be honest, people around the world (and almost all in the rest of the U.S.) know little about how life really is in New York City. Many people may think New York City is Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, SNL and things like that. Ok, good, but NYC is also tiny and expensive apartments, endless hours of work, high level of competition, pricey restaurants, and thousands of park bench people. This last group are not just NYC's props, they are real people who happen to live on the streets.
After almost a decade of living in an extraordinarily noisy city, I came to realize how much all that noise was affecting my perception of reality. Today, in times of pandemic we are experiencing NYC with less exciting distractions and more harsh realities. Following my instincts, I decided to grab my old SONY X10 camera and go out there to catch what's happening in the streets.
I started my route at 14 Street walking down 6th Avenue and then Houston Street to the Lower East Side. I walked nearly 6 miles around the city just to corroborate that the reality is, as I expected, harsh.
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“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”
Chris Marker, (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve), French filmmaker and multimedia artist born in 1921 and pioneered the essay film, an the avant-garde cinematic form that brings a personal approach to documentary and non narrative footage. Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful.
His best-known work, La Jetée (1962), is a short subject composed almost entirely of still photographs, with the exception of a brief film shot; the “plot” later served as the inspiration for the cryptic time-traveling drama Twelve Monkeys (1995).
