Category — Jeffrey

When I first sat down to put my collage together, I wanted to choose images that represent the way people see me.  Swimming would have been predominant, but beyond that I couldn’t think of anything else to put on it.  After deliberating for a long time, I decided to narrow the focus of my collage to represent things in which I believe.  I figured people see me all the time, but my beliefs are very rarely seen.

[Read more →]

For the greater part of the last 18 years, there has been a silent war being waged between me and my brother.  The battles were always brief and indirect.  Clashing in the open just isn’t our style.  All of our bouts and their outcomes were concluded to be illegitimate – SAT scores, school grades, and best times in swimming were all declared void because of the two year age difference.  He took the old school SAT out of 1600 while mine was the new one out of 2400.  He attended Stuyvesant High School, where they don’t give weighted averages for AP classes.  We started swimming at the same time, meaning I had a two year head start on him relative to our ages.  We just didn’t think it was fair to use our separate performances under vastly different conditions to answer the questions that everyone asks: Who’s smarter? Faster? Stronger? Better?  People seem to take pleasure in labeling one of us as superior – some kind of strange amusement in pitting siblings against one another in their minds.  Both of us think otherwise.

[Read more →]

Sam Freedman’s mother attended Baruch College.  This is probably one of the reasons why he decided to visit our class.  A well known columnist and writer, it was truly a privilege to have him in our classroom to give some insight on his book Who She Was, as well as lend us a hand in writing our final projects.

[Read more →]

The entrance to the Steve Kasher Gallery is easy to pass by, without much more than a small poster to trumpet its existence amidst the apartment buildings.  I stepped out of the elevator and was immediately affronted by a wall of silence.  Stark, white walls along with the thin black photo frames declared that this gallery is serious business.

[Read more →]

The entrance to the exhibit is painted red, presumably to represent love.  There is text on the wall says “Many artistic masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance were created to commemorate the most significant moments of private life: betrothal, marriage, and the birth of a child.”

[Read more →]

A group of people assembles on stage and then a crescendo of voices declares the names and heritage of the people to whom the voices belong.  It doesn’t take long for the voices to become a wall of noise assaulting the ears and minds of the audience – the ears struggling to deal with the loudness and the mind spinning in an attempt to decipher so many voices at once.  And so begins Les écailles de la mémoire, a combination of two dance troupes: Urban Bush Women, hailing from Brooklyn, and Compagnie Jant-Bi, coming all the way from Senegal.  The two groups come together in an attempt to recreate the history of the African and African American peoples.

[Read more →]

After receiving a digital point and shoot camera for Christmas last year, I’ve slowly improved my photography skills. I am by no means even close to being considered a good photographer, but I have learned through trial and error about how to use my camera and how to manipulate basic shots. This street photography project is actually an extension of a variation on the Traveling Gnome that I did while on family vacation over the summer. I took pictures featuring a small, plush 1-Up mushroom that was given to me by someone very important to me, as a way of having her symbolically accompany me on vacation.

[Read more →]

Susan Meiselas was a leading voice in the debate on documentary practice, and sought to create a new understanding of the role of photographs in constructing meaning and truth.  Some of her prominent projects covered carnival strippers, and some took her to Nicaragua and other political conflicts in Central America.

[Read more →]

Cornell Capa was the founder of the International Center of Photography on 42^nd Street.  Described as a “concerned photographer,” he traveled to many places in Central and South America in 1953, including Guatemala, Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, and Ecuador. While there, Mr. Capa wanted to use his photography as a way to show the world “a believable mirror of the human condition, a mirror that mankind must finally face.”

[Read more →]

The theatre was shaking as we entered to find our seats.  Hip-hop beats flowed forth from somewhere behind the stage, and soon the lights dimmed to signal the beginning of the performance.  We were introduced to a man named Sir John and his protégé Clay.  The story itself was told through a fractured timeline, frequently revisiting the first scene and revealing a little bit more each time.  Clay uses hip-hop to weave the tale of a young boy named Clifford who escapes his emotionally detached father by taking hip-hop lessons in Brooklyn.

[Read more →]