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Elderly | a photo project documenting senior citizens in my community

This was inspired by an article I read about how elderly people groom themselves with nail clippers. The news stated that  elderly people need a special nail clipper that has a handle and a magnifier glass on it to cut their toenails. I realize that elderly folks need to overcome a lot of things that most people are not aware of, such as cutting their toenails. This project is to show respect and to understand how the elderly have value in our community.
I took pictures of their belongings that they think are important to them, and pictures of the elderly themselves. My grandma served as my model in the sunshine. I personally have an attachment to the sunset, and I use the metaphor that the sunset is my elderly grandma who is warm, and always takes care of me. It also represents a diminished beauty, with the sun setting.

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Scared Land Community Project, Alex Nasoni

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Scared Land Community Project, Alex Nasoni

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Scared Land is my community project highlighting the inequality of land usage that plagues Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. I researched and photographed Ontario International Airport, Echo Park, Hollenbeck Park, Ramon Garcia Park (Both Boyle Heights), and the Upland Industrial zone all which in different ways are the center of a battle for how land should be used.

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Socially Engaged Photography Community Project- Alex Nasoni

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In LA there are many oil rigs scattered all over hidden in plain sight. Not a lot of people know about it there are pictures from the past that show oil rigs lined up all along the coast by Huntington. If i wasn’t looking into it I wouldn’t have known that there are all these oil drilling sites scattered all around encased with large fake building sculptures. I would have looked at it and not thought twice that there was a toxic drilling sight right in front of me. Unfortunately, these oil rigs end up in low-income neighborhoods or high population areas that affect the health of the people around them. The idea of the project is to bring more light to the situation and photograph the rigs hidden in plain sight.

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The Moral and Sexual Agency and Connection to Self for Black Women from girlhood onward

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The Moral and Sexual Agency and Connection to Self for Black Women from girlhood onward

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The video I curated is too large of a file to be uploaded here so I'll have to find another way to get that to everyone but I will go ahead and place my description/ artist statement here.

Through this art, I argue for the recognition of radical womanist ethics to describe the liberatory practices constituted by restoring the rights of black women that have been corrupted by shame, recognizing that Western ideals of purity and freedom has revolved around establishing order through the control of black womens’ bodies and agency.  must now be constituted in how they choose to care for themselves and exercise their morals without shame and chastisement from society. The existence and labor of Black women and femmes are often forced to have a utility that furthers black liberation while black women are sinful should they liberate themselves in any sense.

I put this project together to follow the trajectory of black girlhood and womanhood as it is situated next to male companionship and suggest a reimagining of the self for the black woman that has the autonomy to function outside of desirability and the manipulation of their bodies being one that is not next to faithfulness but oppression.

This work suggests that even in digression, black women must not depend on respectability to get the free, it is rather that their sight is stolen but they reconnect with it in realizing that we have all we need to be free and have been in the past.

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Glenn Albrecht first used the term “pyschoterratica” to describe the inextricable ties between our individual and collective psychological health and an increasingly vulnerable planet. In the age of the Anthropocene, our climate change mitigation technologies draw upon the very resources we aim to protect. Isolation, extraction, and production to excess have become embodied languages for much of the human world; these stories we tell ourselves at present about who we are and what we need have deep-rooted implications for our material future. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences. As the younger siblings of creation, we have much to learn.

Art empowers us to imagine alternative ways of being and doing. Growing up in California, drought was a near-permanent reality within my community. Even away from home, I did not understand how many other communities—human and more-than-human—had creatively developed resilience to drought long ago. Moving from Northern to Southern California, I suddenly had a vast community of drought-resilient neighbors. Plants like the euphorbia ingens, commonly known as the candelabra tree, have been around for tens of millions of years. Their adaptive behaviors have created the conditions for their survival against all odds. Our bodies were made to harmonize with our environment and other beings. How can we actively listen to and learn from the evolution of these other beings? How much do the bounds between species blur as we seek out new modes of survival in the face of climate change? What would kinship with cacti look like?

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Drought __ Physioterratic Futures - Sadie Scott Spring 2022

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“Materialism” | A photo essay

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Here is my final project. It is part research presentation, part photography, and part interview.

Scale
- In this section, I focused on the immense scale of the highway infrastructure in Boyle Heights. I find it hard to truly understand their massive size when just driving on it, so I hoped to bring the ground-level view to the forefront of my project.

Atlantic and Wittier
- In this section, I focused my photography on the "sandwiched" nature of this area in Boyle Heights. By capturing the dead-end signs - all of which were within just a few hundred feet from each other - I hope to show the way communities are cut off due to highway infrastructure.

Lucia
- In this final section, I share a few photographs and an interview with a woman named Lucia. Lucia approached me while I was taking pictures, and after speaking with her for some time, I asked if I could interview her for my project. She agreed but asked that I only share her name as "Lucia"

The interview is as follows:

How long have you lived in Boyle Heights?
⁃ “My whole life. My family has been here for three generations and my children were born here too. This is our home.”

Is it difficult to live so close to the freeway?
⁃ “Yes, the freeway is a sore. My mother thought so when it was built and we think so now. We do not choose to live near it, it chooses to live near us.”

Why do you think there are so many freeways in Boyle Heights?
⁃ “I don’t know. That is a question for a white man with a suit and a briefcase.  Maybe because we are poor. But it is our reality.”

Is there anything you’d like people to know about living in Boyle Heights?
⁃ “We are forgotten by the city around us. So many people drive by but no one stops. It’s more than the freeway. We are doing the best we can with what we have.”

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Social Issue: The harm of intimate relationship ghosting

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Social Issue: The harm of intimate relationship ghosting

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(The videos of my project are too large to be uploaded here, so were uploaded on google drive. Please do not share them to anyone as I promised the interviewees that their videos will only be watched by our class.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YXvFHnYSShsqvItAesshwO0sT6d0dvsK?usp=sharing )

Ghosting is when a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they’re dating. They do this with no warning or notice beforehand. They avoid your phone calls or texts, and even go as far as to avoid you in public. (Kaila. 2022)In the short-term, ghosting may lead to internalized feelings of self-criticism and self-doubt. Over time, these feelings may hinder the development of trust and vulnerability in future relationships, “which are key ingredients for developing intimacy. (Drake, 2021)

My personal project about benefitting the community will focus on the harm of ghosting and using shared (anonymous) experiences from people who were ghosted. The project's final product will be videos from all the individuals who shared their experiences of being ghosted (either in an anonymous or non-anonymous format based on preference). The hope is that this video will provide some form of catharsis or closure to those who have been ghosted for unknown reasons.

This project was inspired by the article "why ghosting is so harmful" as well as the personal stories of friends who have been ghosted for unknown reasons. Ghosting is an increasingly common social phenomenon, and so the goal of this project is to help to heal people who were cut off for unknown reasons by their former friends/other relationships.

My team will interview  people in Pitzer community asking them the following questions:

1. Please tell me how you met your friend.
2. What happened before you were ghosted.
3. What did you do and think after you were ghosted?
4. Did you find out why in the end?
5. How did you move on and let the friend go?
6. What, if anything, do you want to say to this friend?

7. What do you want to say to the people who have the same experience as yours?

I hope by taking this interview it can provide people who have the same experience 1), a chance to get it off their chest; 2), say goodbye to the past; 3) help people who had the same experience.

The 30-40 mins interview will be conducted as follows, interviewees can choose either way that makes them more comfortable to share their experiences:

1) they talk with my teammate and they will be filmed by a camera

2) they talk with my teammate and their voice will be recorded by a recorder

they can choose to face the camera or face it with their back if that’s more comfortable for them.

they can choose to share their name/nickname/anonymous if that’s more comfortable for them.

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Urban sprawl, which is the expansion of an urban area into the countryside, has significant environmental, economic, and social impacts on our communities. Therefore, for my project, I decided to focus on urban sprawl in Los Angeles. My time at Pitzer, I've noticed how cars are essential to go anywhere. When I do decide to walk someplace, it is along a very busy road (or even a freeway), and is surrounded by empty lots of abandoned development. This semester, I'm taking a class called Mulholland Drive to Montclair, which focuses on the environmental history of Los Angeles, further motivating me to do my project on urban sprawl. With this project, I wanted to show the alienation of urban sprawl, and how much it can alter a landscape. I juxtaposed the roads/highways as well as the barren landscape/empty plots of development with the mountains in the background (as they are a fundamental aspect of our surroundings).

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Shadows of the Rose Garden

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Drapkin Shadow of Colonialism on Scripps Campus

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Drapkin Shadow of Colonialism on Scripps Campus

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This set of photos was taken on the Scripps campus and works to capture the traces of colonialism apparent on the Scripps campus. There are two sets of photos which work to do this––one which focuses on the European architecture throughout the campus. This style of architecture is popular through Southern California. It is referred to as "Mission Revival style". It is rooted from Christianizing institutions. The celebration of the beauty of this architecture at scripps erases the missions of their brutal and bloody pasts for popular consumption.

The other set is the non-native rose garden which the campus dedicates insane amounts of water to take care of. Non-native plants are a clear indication of colonialist processes and history.

My process for these photos is taking the shadows of images I have captured of these parts of campus and subtracting them from the photos themselves. This works to show the ways these pieces of Scripps hide in the shadows of their claims to liberal education, not discussed in their admission pages. My photo project hopes to bring these issues to light and into a discussion about the ways our school's histories are important and apparent in our educational experiences and environments.  I think this works to emulate the ways these visuals conceal their violent histories through their popular beauty. I want to create something that gets students to think about what parts of our education are being romanticized, what visual methodologies are being deployed, what lies in the shadows? I love that these photos are still visually beautiful––containing almost the look of a painting.

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Representation is very important. It's difficult to imagine how much potential is lost as people from marginalized communities are dissuaded from participating in the fields that they could excel in, from feeling like they don't belong.

This is a friend of mine named Marissa, an aspiring mathematical and computational biologist who felt underappreciated in mathematical circles in high school. I wanted to photograph her, to gain experience as a portrait photographer, and  to honor her as a strong biologist.

In terms of photography, let me know what I could do better for future shoots, as I want to photograph more people for this series. In terms of editing and design, let me know if there's any way these images might be improved, and how I could better design the template to be more aesthetically appealing.

[I didn't intend for this to come off as an advertisement for HMC diversity, but that's the vibe I'm getting. Let me know if you feel the same way.]

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Representation is very important. It's difficult to imagine how much potential is lost as people from marginalized communities are dissuaded from participating in the fields that they could excel in, from feeling like they don't belong.

This is a friend of mine named Rohan, an amazing pianist who has felt like an outsider in academia, and music in particular. I wanted to photograph him, to gain experience as a portrait photographer, and  to honor him as a fantastic pianist.

In terms of photography, let me know what I could do better for future shoots, as I want to photograph more people for this series. In terms of editing and design, let me know if there's any way these images might be improved, and how I could better design the template to be more aesthetically appealing.

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dylan- aaron mckinney & russell henderson (2)

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dylan- aaron mckinney & russell henderson (2)