philipemelo97

[philipemelo97]

1 – Chris Facey (@coco.butter.shutter) is a documentary and portrait photographer that uses Instagram to share his work and some of his projects. He is a photographer sponsored by Fujifilm, and that should show how important of a voice he is. Chris Facey is an African American man in his 30’s and he has been doing a major project called #DadDutyProject, in which he wants to debunk “the myth of absentee fathers”, especially the black ones. Chris was also a big voice in the “Black Lives Matter” protest, and was committed to tell stories of people that were in those protests and to show the relation of the people and the police. The work of Chris can be seen as a way of sharing to the world, stories of African American men and women that probably would not be heard, and the depiction of these people can be related to the way that they are represented in the media. There’s also the fact of how photography was used in the civil rights movement, and how important it was, and even though is not as big as the civil rights movement, Chris work with the BLM protests is a big one. Facey’s work with photography can be seen as important as the work of other great photographers such as Joshua Rashaad McFadden and other great names of the modern era photography. Chris is one of many photographers that were trying to catch the moments of pureness of the protests, and he did that by attending to a lot of them in New York and catching the moments of struggle, demonstration of power, and the moments of peace and fight that were all going on at the same time in the middle of the movement. Also, the fact that Facey wants to end one of the many ways that people portray black people, and especially black families should be in focus here. As a father, he wants to tell other stories of fathers that are not what they are portrayed, absentees and that they are the ones who take care of their kids.

2 – The fact that Chris Facey is a African American photographer makes him closer to the subject when it comes to race and ethnicity. The people in his pictures are the representation of the black people in American in the way that he sees it. His work is mainly done with black people, and it could be said that it resonates more with them, but his pictures are universal. The representation of not only people there, but the stories behind it shows that he understands what his position as a big voice for the black people. In his work, the conversation is not only started by how he represents these people, but because of the testimonies that he always puts in the description of the pictures. These descriptions normally are something that the person who was photographed said, and he uses that verbatim. Chris gives a voice to the black people, but he doesn’t limit himself to that, he also tries to represent the importance of white people in the fight of the BLM movement, and how they can help combat this injustice and inequality in every aspect of this fight. Chris, when depicting the BLM protests, he was also seeking for images that represented African American people in the protest, and he came up with some pretty interesting images. He was able to capture the moment where a woman was being arrested, he was able to capture a moment were a car of a cop was on fire. He also showed how white people were privileged that they could yell and say things to the cops and not be arrested for it. These discrepancies are another part of the conversation that his photos bring to the table.

3- Chris’s new project #DadDutyProject is based on the idea that fathers are absentees in their children lives, and that by all means, this is the case especially with African American dads. He takes portraits of fathers with their kids, and ask them what is the meaning of fatherhood to them. This project is not only important to him, but also it should be important to any type of person who knows how African American families are depicted. There’s an example from the fresh prince of bel air that comes to my mind, when Will only lives with his mother until he is sent to live with his uncle. His father is always a missing figure in the show, and the project of Chris is show that, even though there are a lot of families without a father, that this is not the normal idea, and this is not the normal situation. By showing these people and their insights on what it means to be a father, Chris is actually taking a stand against this old idea of a fatherless black America. By being a documentary photographer, Chris is showing to the people not what something seems to be, but what something IS and his view on it. On his pictures, African American people are not the bad guys, they are not on the sidelines, they are the central topic. Their lives, their struggles, their day-to-day, are what matters to him. If he has to show them doing something that they were not supposed to he is not afraid, but he will not be the one trying to paint a picture of African American people that was already painted without his help. Facey makes his portraits of African American people on the street so that their stories can be told. His projects not only make a change in the people who participate, but also in the way that other people look at the black people and understand that each one has their own story, not everybody grew up in a fatherless house, poor and had to fight for everything, but the other way around is not the case for most people. Chris tells stories that the humanize every single person in front of the lens.

[philipemelo97]

Media Journal #2 - When They See Us

1 - "When They See Us" is a limited series by Netflix and directed by the acclaimed artist Ava DuVernay. This limited series tells the story of the 5 of the Central Park. For those who don't know, the 5 of the Central Park were 4 young black boys, and a young Latino boy, that were accused and WRONGLY convicted for the rape of a white women in the Central Park in New York. This case gained a lot of attention at the time, because in 1989, Donald Trump was a huge force in the media, and was one of the people that manipulated such medium so that it could start seeing these boys as the real perpetrators of the crime, based only on the color of their skin. Not only the people in New York bought this idea, but also the mayor of the city was so desperate to get the person who did it, that the easiest people that he could find and put the blame on were those boys. The fact that these boys were in the central park was the only thing that they could pin on them. There was semen at the scene of the crime, and none of the DNA matched the DNA of the semen, and the prosecutor said that it was only because there was one more suspect that they could not find. These kids were beaten; coerced to lie about what they’ve done; they were used by the police without the knowledge of their parents, and they still managed to get the kids locked up. When They See Us shows us the whole case, the story of these kids, who they were before this happened, what they were doing. They also show us the who these kids became; how their lives changed after they were sentenced to prison and what happened to them until, they got out. They finally were released and given pardon. These black and Latino kids were taken just because of their skin color, there is no other way to put it. The way that this limited series relates to what we’ve learned this semester is most connected to the media importance to them; their representation on pictures and newspapers; the way that this affected the population to find a guilty party; white privilege, since nobody even thought that the perpetrator could be white; is also related to the rights of these kids being violated since they didn’t have a fair trial, and before that they didn’t even had lawyers of even their parents with them.

2 – One of the first readings that I can remember that relate to this limited series is by McIntosh and White Privilege. Watching this for the first time we can understand how these kids were only brought to this situation because of the color of their skin, and that has to make you think “what if these kids were white, would they’ve been treated the same?”, and of course your answer would be no, because there’s no way, especially in a place like NY in the 80’s that they would arrest white kids and blame them for something that obviously they didn’t do. Another way that I can think about how McIntosh influenced how I watched this is that, when white people know that they are privileged in some way, they have to force themselves to help their fellow black friends to try and finish this system. The conversation that this brings to the table is not only about white privilege in general, but more specifically on the judicial system, and how can people help to change this situation. These kids would not have spent most of their lives in prison if the system was not corrupt and biased towards people of color. This conversation has to happen, because is how we start to change people’s minds on this matter. If we watch another piece by Ava DuVernay, called “13th”, we understand that the criminal system is flawed since its origin. Prisons were made to control the black population in the aftermath of the civil war, and this is how the system was born, and this kind of thinking is still remains in the people at the top, even if there are small changes, is not enough to rebuilt this. Why are black and Latino people more susceptible to be arrested for a small quantity of illicit drugs than white people? Why are black people more likely to get heavier sentences? This is all a matter of white privilege, and it revolves around one of the most important issues of the country with the biggest amount of people incarcerated. The conversation that this limited series helps us to have about the justice system of the USA, about white privilege and about the impact of these in black and Latino lives.

3 – When They See Us is one of the main examples of how media can be an important factor in any instance of the life of a person. As I said it before, Donald Trump, former TV Host, was one of the people that “intervened” in the accusations made towards these kids. In the series is shown that he was one of the people that wanted to put these kids on the electric chair. Since the media factor helped the population to accept these kids as guilty, we have to understand that the representation of black, at that time, was important to guide the viewers towards a kind of thinking. Going back to my other entry of the journal I mentioned Deborah Willis and her article “Exposure” where she says that photography was used to oppress and subjugate. Even though she says that it was also used for good purposes too, I want to focus on the idea of the media using her power of influence to make people’s mind about the case of the 5 of the Central Park. Going back to another idea of the representation of Black people on television, normally labelled as a black character, as put by Dyer in her article “On the Matter of Whiteness”, explains that this labelling, helps to create a distance between those people who are watching and the characters that “don’t belong in the same race as them”. This was used in the same way by Suken and Cartwright in “Practices of Looking”, showing how OJ Simpson was represented in his mugshot and colored so that his skin was darker than the original picture. These little changes are what make this distance between a white audience and a black person bigger. The media knows that it can change people’s minds, either by photoshopping a picture or by labelling a character, television is an image medium, the same principles of controlling and oppressing used by Willis, can be used here. This manipulation of the representation of Black people is not something new, and as long as they are treated on TV as criminals, murderers and so on, this image will be stuck on the minds of people who are not aware that they are being manipulated. Only when Black people start being widely represented in every sense of their lives, like being a family person, a person with a job, with love in their hearts; only then, this imagery can become something more close to reality and be something that people can relate to by its true meaning.

[philipemelo97]

Media Journal #1 - Selma

"Selma" is a movie made by Ava DuVernay and released in 2014. The movie talks about the city with the same name, and how this city was the focal point of the Civil Rights Movement. The film depicts how the leader of the movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the city as an example of what white people were doing to black people in the country, but specially on the South. Selma was a place that still didn’t let African Americans vote in 1965, and was the stage of a brutal repression by the police against the protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the protesters were marching from Selma to Montgomery to fight for their constitutional right to vote. The film also show how the fight for this constitutional right was not easy in this town, and it took fight, sweat, blood and death. This fight was not only done by MLK and his colleagues, but also by the SNCC and John Lewis. Both of these groups joined forces, and with the help of other associations across the country that saw what was happening in Selma and decided to go there, they were able to pressure the president Lyndon B. Johnson to pass a bill that forced the people in the south to let African Americans to vote. The film focus a lot on the fight of Martin Luther King, but we can see the struggle of the people from that town to keep their hopes high that something was going to change for them. Some of the themes that the movie explores touches on the segregation that was happening at that time in the country. Also, shows the disposition of people of Selma to achieve their goals. The way that this subject relates to the topics we studied this semester is by not only the depiction of the African Americans on the screen, but the Civil Rights Movement, segregation, photography in that time and the differences of treatment in race. Some of these topics are more prominent than others, but that moment in time was a part of history that began some of the changes that lead to the rights that African American people have today in the USA.

The identity of the African American people in the USA was always related to how they were portrayed in photographs in the early years of that medium. Always used to explore, assimilate and to be used as a way of controlling the thoughts of the population to a certain kind of person. Some of the examples used in Suken and Cartwright “Practices of looking” are Emmet Till and O.J. Simpson. The representations of them in photography show how Black people were manipulated in the news to appear something and convey a meaning that at first they didn’t have. The identity showed in Selma, representing Black people as protesters, as people who wanted their rights is one of the ways that Ava shows Black people as they really are. Another thing that the movie shows is how the people from the church came to help those people in Selma. A movement that was supposedly to be only of the African Americans was caught by people that saw what was happening and felt for those people. It didn’t matter that they were not from the same race, it only mattered that it was a struggle that went beyond that. The conversation that this movie creates is not only about the history of that place, but it shows how somethings goes beyond race barriers. The fact that people were being denied their rights was something that sparked other people to help. This movie shows that even though we know that people are different, that they are treated different, there are still a lot of good people out there willing to fight for their sisters and brothers. Another conversation is about how Black people were portrayed in this movie, and showing that their identity is not only based on being a side character to the white men. The identity of these men and women on the movie are really well seen and exploit. From their religion, their beliefs, to their actions and voices being heard, Ava does a good job of representing the people from her own race in a way that their identity are not lost in characters, but they represent their people.

The representation of the black people in the screen comes way back to one of the first movies released in the USA. “Birth of a Nation” depicts black people (by doing the phenomenon called “Black Face”) as rapists, murders and that they were supposed to be dealt with by killing them and putting them in jail. Besides countless other problems that came with it, the representation of black people in the screen took place there. After this, normally depicted as gang members, inmates, people who commit crimes; a little bit later it started to take shape the representation as a sidekick of the white characters, or their best friends. This led to the type casting of African American people to these kind of roles, but Ava is different. Ava is known to work on films that the matter are revolving around African American people. She not only tell the stories that happened to black people on the past, but she represents them not as a side character, or as “a black character”, just as people. Dyer mentions on the article “On the Matter of Whiteness”, how black people are always represented as a black character. He uses the example of “… a cop and his black sidekick…”, which it was always something common, but that is being changed little by little. The movie talks about the history of black people and it does that by showing them as part of a society that did not want them, that they were not represented in, and that they had to fight, that they have to choose people to represent them and to be their faces in the front. This representation could be achieved by other directors, but Ava is a black woman, and she knows how black people were, and still are represented in the big screen, and without making an effort, she just treats the movie, and this representation as a documentation of the real people, and representing them as people, not as an asset to the white character. As said in “Only Skin Deep, by Deborah Willis, “the photography was instrumental in galvanizing young people, motivating cultural change and defining the significance of the struggle for human and civil rights that eventually forced the Federal government into creating laws against racial domination and discrimination.” Selma is a reflection of what photography did. Selma is the reflection of young people tired of being treated, and seeing their people being discriminated by the white power.

Dr Martin Luther King Speech in Brown Chapel in Selma