Life in the Ghetto

On the New York Times website, David Gonzalez has written a sensitive piece about his recollections of living and teaching and taking photographs in the South Bronx during the late 1970s. While I grew up a million miles away from the South Bronx socioeconomically, geographically, I grew up just a couple miles away. Gonzalez's piece reminds me a little of a city I once knew, a city that seems so distant today.

At a time when the South Bronx was thought of as the single worst ghetto in America, Gonzalez finds a neighborhood alive with culture. His is not a tale of hopelessness. It's also not a tale of residents who, despite the odds, fight to overcome their environment. By seeing the South Bronx's residents as human beings, free of any pre-digested sociological narrative, he finds a community rich with culture, where children play, neighbors sit on stoops, kids squeegee windshields, buildings crumble, and couples dance in the street. The affirmation that Gonzalez finds is not a transcending of conditions so much as it is a vitality within them. He reminds us that in the end, life in the ghetto is just life.

There's a four minute audio slideshow of Gonzalez's photographs with narration here. Really cool.

I saw kids in the middle of burned out lots acting like kids would anywhere else. And I photographed some of them... [The kids to whom I taught photography] just photographed their world. And even though they lived in this messed up neighborhood, they photographed utterly ordinary things: their parents at home, their kid sister sleeping, their friends playing in the streets. And it taught me to just look at that. And so I really didn't photograph a lot of the rubble if you will. I photographed the life that persisted in the middle of all of this. And it was a really important lesson that in this place written off as hopeless, I found people just moving on....

And I think having come from there and more importantly having gone back there, it's something to be proud of actually. And it's not pride in the sense that 'I survived this tough place.' It's the kind of pride that 'I'm still part of this place in a very essential way.'"