I love looking into the past when I create contact sheets from weeks or month old negatives. I’m having a difficult time with the recent pictures I took of Mark, Hanna and Isaac because the lab curled them into a tiny little roll over Christmas and it’s very hard to get them to lay flat. Here are some scans of negatives that I plan on working on once they are flat.
Ale, Lizzy, and Laura at Halloween.
My parents backyard in the early morning.
The Schuelers.
Eli and Mark, crossed legs and cameras.
I just came across the last roll of medium format film from Boston. This is the last photograph on the roll- one that Eli took of me as we were packing up the apartment. I loved how the sun came into the apartment in the early afternoon.
At home over Christmas we looked through a bunch of my Aunts old photographs and I scanned a couple tiny photographs of my mom from when she was a child. I’ve only ever seen a few photos from her childhood.
my mom is on the left, her sister Donna is on the right.
I also took a photograph with my mom in her bathroom with her rainbows. She believes in the good power of these rainbows and has been collecting glass and crystals that she carefully places in her bathroom. Her newest addition of an old chandelier causes ephemeral rainbows that scatter across the walls. This only happens in the winter when there are no leaves on the trees and when the sun is at just the right angle. When it happens it is magical.
Mom and her rainbows.
It has been a crazy couple of months since I last blogged. The big news is that I am putting up another “Raising them Right” show in February. It is going to be at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy and I am going to work with Duke to put together a few talks on the topic. I’m very excited to be able to look at my work from a completely academic standpoint.
I have been reading everything that I can find on the topic and have finally found some academic literature that reflects all that I experienced in Chelsea. Almost all writing I have encountered about teen pregnancy is misguided. It is such a hot topic that the information readily available rarely is well researched. I become very frustrated when I read articles that place blame on teens and that state that teen pregnancy is a cause of poverty. I feel that anyone who works within such a community understands that poverty and teen pregnancy have a more confounded relationship and if anything it is the poverty and lack of meaningful opportunities that causes young people to want a baby to bring meaning to their lives.
Anyhow, I just finished a wonderful book on these topics and will write more once I have time to digest.
In other news, here are some photographs that I have been meaning to post from the past month or two. After returning my Duke camera, Mac, and copy of Photoshop, I finally bought a new camera and have been learning how to use it, my new Mac, and lightroom.
Here are some photographs from a lovely family walk (minus Greg) over Thanksgiving. The light was incredibly beautiful.
My favorite photos from Thanksgiving Dinner.
Some presents silk screened by me! This is the season of robots and owls. If you received a Christmas present from me, chances are it had an owl or a robot on it.
On December 4th we celebrated Eli’s birthday.
Eli and my house is way too small for a tree so we helped Rusty and Erin set up their tree.
We hosted a dinner party and had another birthday pie for our friend John. 
And we became God parents (or God-less parents) to baby Isaac. I am so incredibly excited to watch Andrea and Isaac grow up. From what I know of these little people, there are no better little people this world has to offer.
I always have a difficult time when my days are timeless with nothing in particular that needs to get done at any given time and everything that needs to get done eventually. Since returning to NC, I’ve been studying for the GREs, looking at graduate school programs, looking for a job, troubleshooting photography issues, and looking at houses. All of these decisions that I need to make feel very oppressive. Finding a job in this economy is incredibly difficult.
I miss being in Boston where I had concrete goals. I miss knowing exactly what I want to do and knowing what I had to do on any particular day. These days I seem to have an incredibly hard time relaxing because the goals are too large to complete on a daily basis. I seem to wake up and go to sleep with the exact same anxieties and the feeling that nothing I do in the course of the day will dramatically reduce the stress.
Yesterday me and Eli spent the entire day out of the house. I needed that, and it was wonderful to escape. We ended up going to the NC state fair. It made me feel proud to be a NC State resident (even if most of the political stickers we saw were for McCain Palin.) I am always so fascinated by how different people live their lives, and at the NC state fair I am always reminded that so many lives in NC revolve around crops and livestock. It’s such a strange thing for me to see young children raising animals to be slaughtered. There is such obvious affection for the animals.
Eli and Dromedary
Amanda and Dromedary
Eli milking a cow
Cow gets milked
Amanda milking a cow
I’ve put up a new website (thanks to Eli) that displays the final project that I completed up in Boston. Check out the new website. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I wanted to create a place online just for the work with young mothers so that this website and blog could become less specifically focused.
I’m finally somewhat settled down in North Carolina so I figure three weeks late it’s about time to write about the opening and to put up some of the photos from the exhibit.
The opening was one of the most amazing nights of my life. So many people came together. It was wonderful to have so many people that I so deeply care about together in the same place.
I was impressed by how many of the young moms came to the gallery and brought their children. Without their help this gallery opening would never have happened. They were in the car with me doing errands beforehand. They were the one’s hanging the photos and putting out the food. And at the end of the gallery show, they were the one’s that helped tear the show down and package it up. It was such a wonderful feeling to know that they were there to make sure that this thing happened.
I also loved how the kids took over the gallery space. Izzy and Denise spent all night playing on the stairs, TJ kept on sneaking chocolate, Naisha and Tommy drew, and Andrea, Evan and Ethan were passed from person to person smiling the whole time. I felt like having all those kids there happily doing what they do spoke more about what these young women have accomplished than anything on the walls.
I was very fortunate to have 3 good friends taking photos during the opening. Thank you Eli, Margaux and Xexeil. Margaux has also put up a flickr gallery if you would like to see some more photos from the opening.
Yesterday Emily, Desiree, Inalvis, Denise and Alex ,one of my high school friends, helped me set up the gallery show. Everyone was so incredibly helpful and I can’t believe how much we got done yesterday. Desiree solved all of the spacing/hanging issues that we were having in the beginning and by 5 o’clock we got all of the medium format photos on the wall and figured out a general gallery plan.
Inalvis, Desiree, and Denise in the gallery
On Sunday Andrea was presented to the church. I am fortunate enough to have been chosen as Andrea’s God mother (I accepted a lot of expectations in Spanish during the ceremony and am going to have to ask Damaris what exactly these expectations were.) Being a part of such an intimate family celebration is making it even harder to pack up our apartment and prepare to leave.
Andrea being presented
Damaris, Andres and Andrea
The presentation of Andrea Isabella
This week I’ve been doing a lot more work than usual. I’ve been trying to track down the last few girls that I have taken photos of but haven’t interviewed. It has been frustrating because some of the girls are near impossible to get in touch with. Jennifer lost her cell phone. Monique’s baby threw the cell phone in the toilet. Yesenia works and is never at home. It’s been frustrating and I feel so pressed for time now that I am calling them with stalker like frequency.
Eli and I are leaving for Michigan in about a week. His family lives there and on the way we are going to spend a couple of days in Montreal and Toronto. I am very excited. I have been so overwhelmed trying to get all of the last pieces done and figuring out the exhibit that I really need this break. When we get back we will have a week and a half to pack our apartment into a car (which means sell most everything on craigslist), put up and take down a gallery show, and say goodbye to everyone here.
Because I am down to my last couple of weeks, I have been enjoying every moment of work. I finished up my last photo shoot on Tuesday with Zeinab and Oliya who are both from Somalia. I ended up at Zeinab’s house for a couple of hours hanging out with her son Ali while we tried to calm him down for the shoot.
The interviews with Zeinab and Oliya have been very interesting because their views about pregnancy and motherhood are very different than those of the other girls that I work with. Oliya is 21 and married. She was engaged for a year before they married and after they married she became pregnant a few months later. A lot of the questions I always ask were irrelevant to her. For instance, when I asked how her relationship with her husband had changed during the pregnancy and after she responded that they were already married so it hadn’t. When I asked how many children she wanted in the future, she responded as many as she will have.
Yesterday Damaris came over with Andrea and we spent the afternoon looking through photos and playing back the video tapes from Damaris’ pregnancy and Andrea’s birth. It is amazing how much they both have changed in the past three months. Damaris has transitioned into a stay at home mom and Andrea is more and more awake and responsive every time I see her. Damaris and I talked for a while about her taking one or two college classes this fall. I can’t even imagine college with a baby. It is so much easier to go through school without stopping or really even thinking about not being there. From everything I have read about young motherhood, the one marker that can really change your income, living situation… for the better is education. Even though Roca is such a nurturing place for young mothers, I support Damaris’ decision to work towards further education rather than to continue to work at Roca.
