“Process of Renewal” by Mom's Solo Following the influx of middle class
“Process of Renewal” by Mom's Solo
Following the influx of middle class
“Process of Renewal” is a documentation on the process of gentrification in South Seattle's neighborhoods. Gentrification is the process of renewal and rebuilding following the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating neighborhoods, often displacing its poorer residents. As a tenant of South Seattle, I am deeply connected to the neighborhood as a witness documenting the occurring change. Through discussion and audio interviews, I am exploring the effects of gentrification and how it affects the individuals who live and work within the place and visually reconstructing the statements from the interviews through the medium of digital text and photography. Having experience in documentary photography and a growing interest in journalism, I chose to interview those who live and operate in this changing neighborhood. During discussion, I engage residents to speak truthfully on how the change has affected them personally and/or those they know that have been affected. After revisiting the audio clips of the interview, I choose specific excerpts from the interview and digitally translate and manipulate the text with a mirror image fill over an interrelating black and white photograph. This creates a distortion that puts the viewer into the distant experiences of those residents affected by gentrification. The work has a lack of immersion due to the surface distortion; the viewer is being forced to work harder to enter the piece – the representation of those affected by gentrification. Most of my personal photography work can be viewed as the autobiographical documentation of my earlier experiences in life – this work specifically revolves around my upbringing in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle. Robert Capa once said “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” I am interested in continually pursuing the intimate relationship of text and photography in this project as personal work.
Trevor's perspective on "Process of Renewal"
I think this is very relevant to the theme of digital literature in that the piece embodies a social issue using text superimposed over images related to the topic. There is a direct line of thought in the way the piece reads, and it forces the audience to delve into the photos of the neighborhoods affected by gentrification, in a sense delving into the neighborhood in a way that audiences could not from just looking at a picture. The reader is forced to stare deeply into the image in order to legibly read the text. This project began as a broad representation of gentrification’s effect on community. It seemed to me that it was a bit too much to wrap one’s head around and be able to package it into one chapter, but as the semester progressed, Mom's notion of representing this issue pared down to a direct and succinct project. I think it helped that he chose a select few photographs of his neighborhood to focus on rather than trying to focus on a wide range of different examples. This allowed him to work on embedding the right text into the piece and freed him to come up with a succinct point. From this particular piece, I learned more of what I’ve experienced in gentrified neighborhoods, that the poorer residents have nowhere to go and are rounded up and shipped off elsewhere. Instead of addressing the problem, developers would rather sweep the problem under the rug; they would rather silence the opposition than welcome their perspective. I like this piece because it forces the audience to get inside it and see firsthand what is going on.
