Amanda van Scoyoc

Last week was the best week I’ve had since working with Roca. Both of my classes went extremely well. It has taken a while to create a structure for them, but I have finally come up with a structure that will work, and I feel that I have become close enough to the participants that I can joke around with them and have them speak more honestly about their life. The Project Sol students react well to the PowerPoints of their work that start every class discussion. They are very impressed to see their work displayed that way. I am hoping to frame a bunch of their photos in the next week or two and put them on display in the art room.

One of the young women I am working with in my Healthy Families group has asked me to work with her to make a video about her life, pregnancy, and child to be. She is currently 7 months pregnant. From now on, I will be going to her doctors appointments to take photos. She even wants me to film the birth.

I am talking to Anisha on Wednesday and I hope that soon I will be able to start a class with the younger (high-school and middle-school) Healthy Families participants. Roca has been trying to figure out a way to get them more involved in Roca activities, when I met with them last week they seemed very interested. The cameras that project snap sent me have been an extremely good catalyst for getting young people involved and for starting conversations.

I’m here bright and early at Roca. I’m trying to get more involved with Healthy Families and I am trying to get to know the younger mothers. This means getting up for their first period parenting classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the local high schools. I am hoping that by getting to know the young people at school, the Healthy Families youth workers will allow me to go along on the home visits. Anisha and Molly want me to be a part of the home visits, but the Healthy Families coordinator has been against it because she thinks having another person in the home will make the visits less affective. I’m hoping that if I get to know the girls first, she will let me come along.

Today I am teaching with Healthy Families during lunch and then with Project Sol in the early afternoon. I always get nervous the night before teaching. It’s the same as test taking, I get very nervous before but during I am calm and focused. I should be collecting the first group of cameras from the Healthy Families group today. I have a long list of topics for the girls to write about and/or photograph on during and after class. I wanted to leave the topics for journaling and photographing very open ended, but the girls react better when I give them very specific questions. I am hoping that by having them tape a list of questions into their journal, it will make adding to the journal less daunting.

Here is a list of questions I am going to give them today.

Topics to Write on:

1. Who was in the room with you when you gave birth? Why? If you are pregnant, who will be there and why?
2. Describe your child’s birth. When did you realize you were in labor? Where were you? Who drove you to the hospital? How long did it take? Did you take drugs? What do you remember of the experience?
3. When did you realize you were pregnant? Where were you? How did you feel? Who was the first person you told?
4. Make a time-line of your pregnancy by month and write down how you remember feeling (physically and or mentally) each month.
5. Bring in old photos that you want to write about. Amanda will scan them and then print out a copy for you to put in your journal. Do you have favorite photos from your pregnancy or from when your child was younger?
6. Bring in old photos of you and your baby’s daddy from when you both were the age of your child now. What parts of you did your baby get? What parts of your baby’s personality are yours? What parts are his/her daddy’s?
7. What was your relationship with your baby’s daddy when you found out you were pregnant? (how long had you known each other? Were you dating?) What is it now?
8. What have been the most fun parts of being a mom? What have been the most difficult parts?
9. How did you buy for your baby before he or she was born? Did you decorate a room or a part of the house for him/her?
10. How did your friends and family react when you told them you were pregnant? How did they act throughout the pregnancy and how do they react to you after you became a mother?

With Project Sol I prepared a PowerPoint that includes their own work and the work of Jim Goldberg and Dan Eldon. I am trying to get across the point that they have something interesting and unique to say about their own lives because they are the only ones who are living it. I am also emphasizing that words can add context and change the meaning of photographs. We are going to go to a park in the area to photograph today because it is an amazing 50 degrees in Boston today.

Yesterday I finished photographing the four paintings that I have completed. It is always a struggle to get the colors right- from painting to camera to web. I need to talk to the young women about how I should title these paintings. For the working titles I tried to use bits of conversation I had with the women around the time that I made each painting.

In other news, I am a bit sick again. My body seems to be reacting to this cold drippy Boston weather.

I took only a short break at home so that I could come back to Boston early and work on a couple of paintings. There is a competition that I would like to enter on the 31st, so I am desperately trying to finish up a last painting for it. Whenever I enter these competitions I feel so out of place with my work. I feel self conscious and uncertain of myself. Self deprecating. Sometimes I feel like combining photography, painting, writing, journaling, and even some psychology together is incredibly innovative. Sometimes I feel like I have spread myself so thin that I can’t excel and it’s tiring to write artist statements.

I am right now so happy at Roca. I am doing a bit of everything I love, but I also know that once the Hine Fellowship is over I will have to fight for a way to combine my interests once again. When I think back to my favorite college professors, the ones that were most inspiring were always the ones that had broad interests. I had a couple of professors who pursued many different interests within a field. I had many other professors had extremely limited interests (I can’t imagine devoting my life to a topic such as best friend relationships between same sex dyads in a controlled environment.) I hope that I will find some way to combine my interests like some of those professors did. On good days I’m convinced that there is a way.

This painting I’m working on right now is all consuming and emotionally draining. It seems with painting there are some paintings that just flow and others that creak along slowly and painfully. The mistakes are so visible, so unavoidable. I can’t be in the same room with the painting right now, parts of it are so bothersome that I can only stop working on it by avoiding it all together.

Doug Martinson, my figure painting professor in college, told me before I graduated that I should only date artists who weren’t painters. He had found true love in a dancer and said that only another artist could understand the torment of a failing painting. He also was certain that dating a painter would drive me into competitive insanity. I think about this sometimes when I’m in the bedroom painting with the door closed and Eli is in the living room editing his photos or working on a website. It’s worked living with Eli because he understands that on a painting day I probably will not leave the house, eat at a normal hour, clean up the house, and I may have to open a bottle of wine if things aren’t going well. I think Doug’s advice was good advice.

I’m happy to say last week I talked to Roca’s administration, the healthy families youth workers, and the young people, and I am now going to be teaching journaling with the young mothers every week. Together, the young women and I, came up with a loose weekly routine which includes turning in rolls of film, completing an opening journaling/creative exercise, talking, writing about a topic and drawing/journaling. Every other week I will be the only one teaching which will allow me the space to bring in some audio pieces about teen pregnancy to discuss. I am excited and the girls seem excited to have a bit more structure and routine to the class. I gave them cameras for the holidays and can’t wait to develop the film.

I am so relieved that I was able to make this change. I had started to feel like continuing to work on the paintings with healthy families was exploitative because I was not in touch with the young women frequently enough to be certain that my work was serving its intended purpose. I felt that without the time to have conversations about how these paintings portray them and how they would like to be portrayed, I could be doing an injustice to the women. I feel much better having had the time and space to talk about some of this with them and knowing this will not be a problem in the future.

Here are a couple of point and shoot photographs of my family and my boyfriend’s family. I have spent the past two weeks falling in love the my new medium format camera. I can’t wait to get back to Boston to develop and scan those photos. Hopefully there will be more impressive photos posted in the near future.

I am about to return from Thanksgiving break/my sister’s engagement party. After two weeks away and after spending time in Michigan, Pittsburgh and Virginia, I am ready to make the drive back up north and start work with a fresh mind.

During this break I have felt so fortunate to be a Lewis Hine Fellow. I have had to answer to the question “what are you doing” at least a dozen times and every time I am reminded of how excited I am to be at Roca and just how many ideas are still floating in my head. I have probably come up with a dozen different answers.

I have been thinking a lot about the little steps that I need to take when I get back to work on Monday. Rather than only focusing on teaching photography classes, I would like to start some small projects working with one person at a time. I think that teaching classes at Roca will be very fulfilling eventually but may always be difficult to orchestrate. At Roca it seems half of the struggle is to make sure the young people show up when they are expected. I think that if I can work on some audio/photography projects with a few of the people I have come to know, I will have projects to work on that will not require as many meetings/supplies and will feel less frustrated and more proactive.

I’ve uploaded into the portfolio section some photos of the first healthy families portrait I’ve been working on this afternoon. I worked from a Polaroid snapshot the girls fiance took of her against the shower curtain in their bathroom. I gave her a Polaroid camera and a pack of film to take home and bring back this week, and I just love the photo of her against the curtain. She is wearing a pink shirt with white hearts and behind her are lilly pads. It is very surreal. I like her stoic expression mixed with the youthfulness of her clothes and the patterns. I’m going to work back into the painting tomorrow, bringing out better flesh tones and reworking the paint after it has dried a bit.

In early October I had pneumonia and was out of work for a week and a half. In that time I was very frustrated because I felt I had just started forming relationships and getting into the swing of things at Roca, and then I was stuck at home with a high fever and a stack of movies.

I found out that the Massachusets Arts Grants applications were due on the 15th, so from my home I helped Roca write a grant asking for money to create a program based on Wendy Ewalds book *I Wanna Take Me a Picture*. Although writing grants is not my favorite past time, we got the grant in on time and it was a great way for me to distill my ideas and have lots of conversations at Roca about the kinds of interactive photography programs that I want to be a part of. Since sending in that grant, we have picked out the students who will be involved, and as soon as I get together lesson plans, a list of supplies, and hopefully access to a dark room, we should be on our way.

I also wrote a personal grant to the Somerville Arts Council for creating paintings based on the writings of the pregnant teenagers and young mothers that I am working with at Roca. I am excited about the possibilities of this project- these women stand apart in their youth and maturity. These women confide in each other about topics most teenagers don’t think about. At times they make me feel very young. I took a walk with one of them the other day and we talked about boyfriends. After she found out I had been in a relationship for a year, she asked me if I was going to have children soon. I told her I was not ready yet and then wondered at my answer. She is a teenager and completely ready to have her baby.

Here is a section of the personal grant that explains the painting aspect of the project.

“In Chelsea, I have been visiting with a group of pregnant teens and young mothers through Roca, a nonprofit invested in keeping young people in school and off the streets. The first time I met with the young mothers group, I asked them what message they would want to send to the world outside of Chelsea. They told me that they want people to know motherhood is a common experience no matter if you give birth at 12 or 30. Even though they are young, they have experienced the same changes of pregnancy and motherhood. They listed some of the problems for me: hormones raging, cravings, sickness, pain, growth, birth, never having enough time, stress, aloneness, and daddy problems. They meet together at Roca to relay stories and lend support, but outside of this close group of friends their voices are not heard. Some of them have a difficult time making friends at school. Some of them feel that people label them as too inexperienced and young to be mothers.

“Together we tried to come up with a way to explore the aspects of motherhood that are the same for all mothers. Roca has given them journals, and together we have come up with different writing prompts. For example, after much discussion it became clear that one of the similar experiences they had shared is that each one of them had vivid dreams about their unborn child during their pregnancy. Each of them could remember in detail these dreams filled with hopes and fears. I would like to use their stories as the basis of a series of paintings that explore teen pregnancy through the eyes of the mother. I will create paintings in my Somerville apartment/studio based on their writings and based on working with each girl to design her own unique portrait. I will then pair these paintings with excerpts of their writings about the things that are common to all mothers. The only identifying information will be their age and the age of their child. The girls are excited to be a part of the creative process of designing paintings, and they like the idea of having a painting of them that will not reveal their physical identity the way a photograph would.”

I like the idea of being accountable to them each week. I tend to be very secretive about my paintings- this year I want to bring my work to a new level and I have decided that to do that I need their help. I like that they will bring something to the meetings and I will have to bring something as well. I like that we each have something very different to offer the other. I hope that combining different kinds of artwork based around the same topic will allow us to feed off of each others creativity.

Liisa recomended the book *The Youngest Parents* by Robert Coles. I have been reading it on my way to and from work and am very impressed by it. My one worry is that by expanding this young mothers project beyond a photography and writing project into something more like a collection of written, drawn, painted or photographed information, I may lose the power of the information.

I’ve spent most of today trying to figure out how this website works and putting up some of my work in the portfolio section. I’ve currently uploaded photos of past work (pictures from Guatemala, my sister Erin asleep after working as a medical residence, and some old photos of my little sisters.) I have also uploaded some of the photographs of my recent paintings.

I have also uploaded some of the drawings that I completed for a booklet about immigrant rights that Roca is publishing and distributing in Chelsea and surrounding areas. The booklet is the first project that Rebecca and I have worked on for Roca. Rebecca helped with the wording in the booklet and did all of the layout and I drew the pictures to go along with the text. Initially we were going to make small cartoons, but I realized after a few embarasing attempts that I have no idea how to draw cartoons. Although the booklet isn’t as “documentary” in style as the projects we will both be working on over the next few months, I think it is going to be a very important project for Roca and for the community. All of the work that Roca does with young people is based on having strong relationships, what Roca calls “transformational relationships.” This booklet will be a great tool for reaching out to the Latino community and beginning the trust and communication necessary to build these relationships. I can’t wait to see the book published- it will be exciting to have something tangible come out of my first month of work at Roca.