Grade levels:
9 - 12
Duration:
Minimum one 45-minute classroom period
About this Exploration
Can a photograph reveal a community’s strengths?
The community asset-mapping process demands that we look at communities from the standpoint of their strengths, rather than their deficits. By shifting our point of view, we can shift people’s attitudes. When community members, rather than outside groups, map community assets, new resources get revealed. And photography is an ideal medium for flipping the audience’s perspective. Use it to identify and document strengths in your own community and see how residents, spaces, and community organizations become assets.
In this lesson, you will explore how photography can illustrate your community’s strengths and potential. To start, you'll consider the idea that photography can express community strengths by analyzing photographs from the Getty collection. You will explore the definition of community assets (spaces, organizations, individuals, knowledge, economic capital, and informal networks), and consider how these assets can be used to bring about change. Next, you will create your own map of community assets. Finally, you'll reflect on the idea that photography can bring about change by reframing conversations about communities and revealing their intrinsic strengths.
Vocabulary
Community
A network or group of people, sometimes living in a particular place, who share interests, values, characteristics, responsibilities, or physical spaces.
Culture
A social system of meaning and custom, developed by a group of people to assure the group’s continuity. The system has unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors, symbols, and styles of communication. Consider using instead: Social identity group, social group
Discrimination
Actions stemming from conscious or unconscious prejudice, which favor and empower one group over others based on differences of race, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, language, age, national identity, and other categories.
Ethnicity
A social construct, used to group people based on shared cultural heritage and characteristics such as values, behaviors, language, political and economic interests, history, geographical base, and ancestry.
Intersectionality
An approach coined and theory developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, scholar of critical race theory, which holds that characteristics such as gender, race, class, and others must be examined in relation to each other, rather than in isolation from each other.
Justice, Injustice
In different contexts, “justice” refers to both moral correctness and fairness, and also the rule of law. By contrast, “injustice” usually describes unfairness.
Marginalize
Treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or powerless; placing them outside of a group, society, or community; and enforcing prejudice through societal institutions.
Privilege
Unearned social power granted by societal institutions to members of a dominant group, based on the nature of their identities. Often invisible to those who have it.
Race
A term used to identify individuals as part of a distinct group, based on physical characteristics and heritage. Though, at one time, the term purportedly was based in biology, race is now understood as a social construct that is not scientifically based.
Religion
A system of beliefs, usually spiritual in nature. Often advanced in the context of a formal institution.
Restorative Justice
A theory of justice that focuses on repairing or mitigating the harm caused by a crime. As a cooperative, in-person process with all willing stakeholders, its goals for offenders include taking responsibility, understanding the harm caused, redemption, and discouraging further harm.
Stereotype
Attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions about a person or group that are oversimplified and unsupported, but may also be widespread and socially sanctioned. Stereotypes can be positive or negative.
Unconscious Bias, Implicit Bias, Hidden Bias
Negative stereotypes regarding a person or group of people, which influence individuals’ thoughts, attitudes, and actions without their conscious knowledge.
Lesson
Introduction
As you look deeper at your community, you will begin to see the strengths and assets that make it a living, vibrant, dynamic culture.
Key questions in this lesson include:
- What are the strengths and assets in communities?
- Can people be assets or strengths? How?
- Does space constitute an asset?
- How do photographers use photography to illuminate, explain, or highlight community assets? And by extension, how do artists use photography to the same ends in a broader context?
To get started, consider the types of things that you think are significant to know about community assets, including the following:
- Physical assets: buildings, tangible items
- Organizations
- People: stories, residents
- Places to gather in safety
- Networks of communication
- Knowledge: experience, age, training
- Economic assets
Then, consider your own community.
- What assets does your community have?
- What strengths have you not thought about before?
- Are strengths and assets static? Why?
- Is there a need for change illustrated in the strengths here?
- Does the world see your community’s strengths? Why?
Set the Stage
Sister, Missionary of the Charity Painting a Statue of Christ, Sacred Heart Garden, South Bronx, 1989, Camilo José Vergara, chromogenic print. The J. Paul Getty Museum. Gift of Bruce Berman and Lea Russo. © Camilo José Vergara
Look at the image shown here. Or, view the image on getty.edu.
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image?
- What do you notice about the setting, clothing, and other objects in the frame?
- What compositional and photographic elements do you notice, and why? Include:
- How is the photograph framed? What perspective is used?
- How is the photograph composed? What is the position of the subject?
- How is the photograph lit?
- Does anything change when you know the title and when it was taken?
- Now that you know the title, what more can you infer about the background?
- What role do you think the sister is playing in the photograph, and in the community?
- What do you think the photographer is trying to show, explain, or share?
- Is the photograph merely documentation, or is there a photographer’s point of view evident?
About Camilo José Vergara
Since 1977, Camilo José Vergara (born 1944) has documented poor, urban, and minority neighborhoods across the United States. Vergara himself experienced poverty as a teenager in his native Chile. In 1965 he attended college in the United States and was stunned by the contrasts in wealth and lifestyles he saw across the country. After completing a graduate degree in sociology, he developed a methodical approach to photographic documentation by researching his subjects and systematically documenting them over time.
View Camilo José Vergara photographs in the Getty collection.
Discuss: Community and Cultural Dominance
Briefly reflect on what you have studied before about the US civil rights movement and what you remember about the period.
Questions for Discussion:
- What are the origins of the US civil rights movement?
- What were the goals of the movement?
- Who are some of the well-known leaders of the movement?
- Who was Malcolm X?
Explore Further
Malcolm X Holding a Newspaper, 1963, Robert (Bob) Adelman, gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum. © Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos
Now that you’ve looked at how a contemporary photographer documented and commented on poor, urban, and minority neighborhoods across the United States, look at another example from the Getty collection. Are there other ways in which photographers use their work to demonstrate, or highlight, community assets and strengths? Can you document community strengths without also spotlighting community problems?
Look at the image shown here. Or, view the image on getty.edu. Read the caption to situate the photograph in time and place.
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image?
- Describe the features and pose of the subject.
- Do you see any community assets here?
- Do you think the photographer is simply documenting a political figure or do you think the photographer is in some way commenting on his subject? Why?
About Robert Adelman
Robert Adelman (1930-2016) often documented influential figures within Black communities, including musicians, athletes, and educators. A strong interest in social justice led him to volunteer as a photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality in the early 1960s. The position granted him access to key leaders of the civil rights movement, including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. He captured moments that reshaped modern American history, depicting not only the marchers, riots, and speeches, but also the fabric of everyday life in rural communities and at social gatherings.
Exercise: Communicating Community Strengths and Assets
In this exercise, you will explore your own community strengths. Working individually or in groups, fill out the Community Asset-Mapping Organizer. [See Resources section.] Your organizer will be shared once completed, so you may wish to determine what you would like to include based on what information you feel comfortable sharing. As a class, share and discuss the assets and resources that were included in the Community Asset-Mapping Organizers.
Practice: Using Community Asset Mapping
Review photographic elements such as framing, composition, traditional portraiture, foreground and background, scale, proportion, and lighting. The related photography skill videos listed under Resources also provide quick skill refreshers. Think about how you will apply these skills and understandings.
Next, make several photographs that show strengths and assets in your community.
Continue your practice at home and in your neighborhood, taking the opportunity outside of class to incorporate these contexts from your daily life into your practice.
Reflect
Sharing your work can feel vulnerable, so creating a safe space for sharing is important for this exercise. In small groups or with a partner, share one to three of your photographs. You may choose to speak about your intention with the photograph(s), or not. Alternatively, this exercise can be done on your own as an individual reflection.
Consider the following questions as you look at each others' photographs and think about what it was like to make them. As you discuss them with your peers, think about ways you can share positive feedback with them.
Questions for Discussion:
- What is the first thing you notice about the photograph?
- What is the photographer explaining about their **culture **or community?
- What did you discover about yourself, your community, and others, in the course of the project?
- What was challenging, and why?
- What part are you most proud of, and why?
- What would you do differently next time?
Banner Image: Untitled, Sabinah Lopez, 2018
