- Joined
- Aug 11, 2005
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Hello,
My name is Noah Huber.
I've started a portrait project - to make portraits of people who are seeking unemployment assistance from the government NOW.
The project is easily circumscribed and simple:
I wait, I talk to people, I ask everyone, I listen. I make portraits.
The images, I hope, will eventually find their way to be shown to those people "in charge", or those people who have access to them, and put a face on the numbers we all hear every time we turn on the television or the radio or open a newspaper.
It is a small, and possibly inconsequential effort, a trifling kind of therapy for everyone involved - but I believe it is a worthwhile and apropos endeavor.
I'm working in Tucson, AZ - I've been at this for two weeks, put in roughly 20 hours on the ground (longer if you count the time it took to acquaint the offices with what I am doing - the last thing I want is to make adversaries inside the very places I must frequent in order to do the project). In that time I've gotten almost 50 portraits made. If I could have spent more time, or had been a bit better prepared I'd have made close to 50% more portraits, I believe.
This thread is an open invitation to form a "linked ring" of people who are willing to do the same wherever they are. Go to the facilities where the people who are worst off go to seek assistance and make their portraits - as an act of grace, to say by gesture "someone IS looking", in hope of replacing cold hard numbers with actual faces, people and lives. Not allowing the stats to be the only way that the current events are seen. This Global Economic Crisis is a neat and convenient handle for what is in truth a crisis lived and not merely counted. Economies don't have families, economies don't have hopes and dreams, economies don't feel. We do.
My name is Noah Huber.
I've started a portrait project - to make portraits of people who are seeking unemployment assistance from the government NOW.
The project is easily circumscribed and simple:
- Process
- visit local unemployment offices for 3-6 hours, three days a week.
- ask people if they'd mind having their portraits made, explain why, explain what I'm looking for (unemployment)
- make the portrait
- exchange any information they might ask for, take email addy if they request a copy of the image (scan of the neg)
- repeat until out of film or out of the economic crisis.
I wait, I talk to people, I ask everyone, I listen. I make portraits.
The images, I hope, will eventually find their way to be shown to those people "in charge", or those people who have access to them, and put a face on the numbers we all hear every time we turn on the television or the radio or open a newspaper.
It is a small, and possibly inconsequential effort, a trifling kind of therapy for everyone involved - but I believe it is a worthwhile and apropos endeavor.
I'm working in Tucson, AZ - I've been at this for two weeks, put in roughly 20 hours on the ground (longer if you count the time it took to acquaint the offices with what I am doing - the last thing I want is to make adversaries inside the very places I must frequent in order to do the project). In that time I've gotten almost 50 portraits made. If I could have spent more time, or had been a bit better prepared I'd have made close to 50% more portraits, I believe.
This thread is an open invitation to form a "linked ring" of people who are willing to do the same wherever they are. Go to the facilities where the people who are worst off go to seek assistance and make their portraits - as an act of grace, to say by gesture "someone IS looking", in hope of replacing cold hard numbers with actual faces, people and lives. Not allowing the stats to be the only way that the current events are seen. This Global Economic Crisis is a neat and convenient handle for what is in truth a crisis lived and not merely counted. Economies don't have families, economies don't have hopes and dreams, economies don't feel. We do.
