Springfield Self-Portrait Project

Springfield Self-Portrait Project (1993)

Lead Artists: Nick Szuberla and VISTA youth neighborhood
Additional documentation: Zine documenting community animation and low-cost media making as a tool. Timothy Kennedy’s empower model ‘community animation’, 932 negatives, 4 oral histories, prints.

Youth Media as an exercise in community and democracy building
For over thirty years, I have worked with youth, communities, and grassroots groups using the power of media making as a way to build leadership, solve problems and celebrate community.  One of my early projects trained youth in photography in the Fair Vista neighborhood of Springfield, Ohio.  I approached the local NAACP chapter who introduced me to several families in the community, and we formed a small cohort of youth photographers. 

The project worked with a small cohort of youth in the familiar setting of their neighborhood.  The youth explored the neighborhood and documented the stories of local residents. Every neighborhood has stories, struggles, and beautiful places to document; this project helped its participants to focus on their community’s culture and history.   

The youth took self-portraits, documented their elders, and undertook a series that used jumping in the air to create the illusion of flying. The photo-taking became a weekly community event. Media-making in the community on the neighbors’ street became something people were excited about. With each previous week's work shared on an elder’s front porch creating a small public art happening.  As we took new rounds of photos, we developed our vocabulary for understanding the group aesthetic. Together the participants and their guardians developed the photos in a community darkroom and selected images to print.

We curated the images into an exhibit mounted to an abandoned house with plexiglass coverings creating a walkable outdoor gallery. 

This early work started my exploration of media making as a form of community organizing and grassroots power building. My art utilized positive community mirroring, created storytelling feedback loops, and emphasized democratic artistic expression.  By subverting the traditional role of artist and subject, we demonstrated that process can be as important as product.This early work began to explore the role media making could play in community animation - the process centering community knowledge in power building.  My role was organizer and not media artist.