Amanda van Scoyoc

This weekend I am taking a break from from photography and working on a couple of paintings.

On Wednesday I went on my first intake visit with Healthy Families. An intake visit is the first visit with a young mother. Roca gets a referral from either a school or hospital and then schedules a time to meet with the young woman, usually in her home. Before the intake, Roca only knows that the young woman may be in need of Healthy Families services.

At 2 PM, I drive with Eloisa to the address of the young woman on her list. We end up in a part of East Boston that neither of us has been to before, and we park in front of a condo with the address. Inside the building there were 4 or 5 apartments and Eloisa knocks on doors and loudly says “Sandra, is Sandra here? We are looking for Sandra.” She has learned from experience that she must take charge of finding the young women. She opens a door to the wrong apartment and a small child points upstairs. A mother emerges behind the child and says in Spanish that Sandra’s apartment is one floor above.

Inside of the apartment it is dark and noisy. The TV is on as well as a lullaby. Sandra and her mom sit on the couch and we sit down as well. Sandra does not smile or look at us at first. Sandra’s mom asks if she can make us a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. She smiles at us and seems grateful that we have come. The baby is in the corner of the room sleeping in an electrical swinging bassinet that plays the same 2-minute tune throughout the visit. Although the baby is only a few feet away and signs of the baby are everywhere (in Sandra’s still puffy stomach, the music in the air, the toys on the floor, the fact that at 2PM Sandra is at home,) Eloisa doesn’t mention the baby. The focus of intake visits is the new mother. The baby is only mentioned in the question “when did you give birth.”

Sandra’s mom is very proud of her child and boasts that Sandra has always been such an independent young woman. She wants to help Sandra move out of the house and into an apartment with her 18-year-old boyfriend. She is OK with signing the papers so they can get married if that is what Sandra wants. Living in the house is tight. Sandra has three younger brothers.

In an attempt to give Eloisa and Sandra some privacy, Sandra’s mom and I walk over to the sleeping baby. Hovering over it, she says how wonderful it is to have a new baby in the house again. It makes her want a new one of her own. I say how beautiful the baby is. She says that the baby is a good baby just like Sandra was. She says Sandra only had to push seven times to get her out. I don’t know what to say to this so I say, “It must be in your genes. You must be so proud.” We stand around the baby not saying anything and then Sandra’s mom says something about dishes and walks into the adjoining kitchen. I return to the couch with Sandra and Eloisa and we don’t mention the baby again.

I have struggled with the act of being a photographer in a large community center where not everyone knows who I am and why I always have a camera. Roca has received consent to be photographed from all of their young people, so I can take photos of anyone in Roca to be used in Roca – based publications. I try to take photos only of the people who know me, but I have a hard time sticking to that rule.

The photos I take relate to Roca’s key groups of young people. I take pictures that show pregnant teenagers, young mothers, young fathers, young men working, and undocumented youth. They have all already given consent to be photographed at Roca, but is it right to photograph knowing that the photographs will label them as being a part of one of the above groups? I worry that capturing them while they are making a first effort to change their lives isn’t fair.

The issue of consent is very different with the young mothers that I work with. The photos I take of them and the audio interviews I have done with them are much more intimate. In many cases I am asking young women to talk and write openly about sex and relationships. The first couple of months I worked with them I was stressed about making sure I got their consent, but I felt that giving them a paper to sign would send the wrong message when I was simultaneously telling them that their journals were their own personal spaces.

In the past few weeks, I have finally gotten to know the girls well enough that they understand me better, which has made the issue of consent much less of an issue. They now know all about the Hine Fellowship. They have asked me questions like why I don’t have kids, why I live in Somerville, how much I get paid, and why I am working on the issue of teen pregnancy. I have tried my best to answer all of these questions. I have shown them previous work about teen pregnancy and tried to explain that I think it is important that their voices are heard because their stories differ from the public perception of teenage pregnancy. I can’t say they always react with the enthusiasm I hope for.

Last week I played them a Radio Diaries piece on teen pregnancy. I had hoped to discuss how Joe Richmond chose the worst case senario (the girl grew up in foster care, parties all the time, has no relationship with her parents, has an STD). I wanted them to understand that the stories that the public hears about teen pregnancy are often skewed to be the flashiest cases and are not their own. Instead they got very caught up in discussing how much the girl in the interview was partying and how they never get to party because they have kids.

One of the privileges of the Hine Fellowship is that I have the time to be in constant contact with the people whose lives I am documenting. I have the time to show them the work in progress and thus I am never working on something without their knowledge. If you know the participants well enough and you have a clear idea of what you are doing with the material and you keep your participants informed throughout the process there should not be any conflict or need for consent. In reality, I understand that with the limits on time, and changes that happen along the way, this idealism is not always possible. For this reason I do expect in the end to have each girl fill out a consent form. But, I want to make sure that before they sign, they understand exactly what will happen with their work. I want to take the time to go over their work and my work. In particular, I want to go over their journal scans with them to choose together the parts of their work that they give me consent to use.

I think the thing that has affected both my access to these girls’ lives as well as their willingness to display their work is the fact that I have grown to like them and it shows. They know me well enough that they know that I want to tell their stories, not my interpretation of teen pregnancy or the flashiest story. In the end I think of the act of giving consent as an act of trust You are granting your words to another, trusting that they will not use them to harm you in any way. I’m glad that I have taken the time to know these women before asking them to have such faith in me.

Damaris is 19 years old and 7 months pregnant with her first child. She moved to the Boston area from Puerto Rico when she was 5 years old. When I first met her, she was in her first trimester and was so excited to be experiencing her pregnancy. I can tell that she thinks I’m missing out on motherhood being 25 and in a relationship but without a child. She has worked with me to document her pregnancy in her journal and recently with audio recordings and video. I am impressed by the way she crops her photos and decorates her journal. Her work always has a distinctive Damaris style. She believes in being open and honest about her life and pregnancy and has allowed me to scan and put pages from her journal online.

Last week at the Thursday Healthy Families meeting about 5 young mothers came. The mothers range from about seventeen to twenty-one with children up to four years old. All of them are in fairly constant contact with the fathers, but most of them are not married and if they did live together, no longer do. No one in this group is still in high school because the group occurs in the middle of the day at Roca. They are all in some way employed by Roca as young staff or members of Americorps.

I gave the young mothers a list of topics to write about in their journals to spawn conversation. Over a glass of wine at night and a cup of tea in the morning I conjured as many questions as I could about pregnancy, birth and motherhood. In class while journaling about one of the questions, the moment that they realized they were pregnant, a number of the girls prefaced it with an “of course I already knew,” or an “honestly I wasn’t trying to not get pregnant.” They brought up a question that I had forgotten to put on my list- whether or not they chose to become pregnant.

In psych 101 freshman year in a lecture hall with three hundred students, I learned that some women want to become pregnant so that they will have someone to love them. I imagined these women depressed and alone, using sex to make love momentarily and then eternally in the form of a child. I remember thinking it greedy to create a life to fulfill a hole in your own.

In the first couple of months that I worked with Healthy Families the story of how a teenager found herself pregnant was often the first story I heard about a girl. There were the women that knew they wanted to be pregnant before they were, the women who were secretly pleased when they found out, those who came out of the Health Center pale and upset, and the few who denied they were pregnant until the day they gave birth.

Talking to the mothers last week, I realized that I hadn’t asked them to write about the question of whether or not they chose to become pregnant because I assumed the pregnancy stories I didn’t know would mostly reside in the “oh shit” category. For most of them, I know much more about the difficulties they have had being mothers than I know about their lives prior to becoming a mother, and it is hard to imagine them making any decisions about motherhood haphazardly. I see the part of them that hasn’t gone out at night for 2 years because they have a toddler, the part of them that has weathered a pregnancy, a birth, and tiring relations with their baby’s daddy, and the part of them that frets over parenting mistakes.

While listening to them tell their stories about becoming pregnant (many of them remembered exactly where/when), I felt that psych 101 was wrong, that the girls weren’t searching for love any more than any other adolescent. They were living their lives in a way that was familiar to them, the same way their friends were living theirs. In the local high school during a class only for high school mothers, the nurse disparaged the number of pregnant girls dropping out, while the young mothers laughed at a joke and picked studded condoms from the mass of inferior un-studded condoms in the condom basket. Sex seemed the most common of conversations.

The twenty year old in my journaling group who is currently pregnant is the last of her friends to have a child, and is extremely excited to join her friends in becoming a mother. When she told her mother that she was pregnant, her mother was excited and proud of her for being the first of her daughters to complete high school before becoming pregnant. I don’t think these girls’ character and emotional well-being should be questioned because of the choices they’ve made. At the same time, knowing the care these mothers take with their children, it makes me wonder how much motherhood has created the image I have of the women I have come to know.

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.