"In 1996, I signed a lease on the first and only place that I looked at in Brooklyn–the second-floor space over a corner store with the elevated J and Z trains running next to the bedroom window. The landlord referred to the neighborhood as East Williamsburg. The subway map said it was Bushwick, and the neighbors told me that if I crossed the street it was Bed-Sty. I had never been to Brooklyn before, so I wouldn’t have known the difference. I told myself that I was here because the rent was cheap, the ceilings were high, and there was lots of room for my two-year-old son, Simon, to run around in."

from  the book "Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood"

These are the words in the forward of my book.  These are the photos that never made it into that book. I must have edited them out on my way to " the good " stuff. I found then in my basement a few weeks ago. They made me think about how much had happened since the kids were all that little. How many were not here anymore…Pepe…Antoine…Jordan. I was reminded how much the neighborhood has changed, how big Simon has gotten and how long Andy has been part of our lives. These pictures must have seemed too ordinary to me the first time I looked at them. When i revisit them now and hear the sounds of just another day a decade ago, i am reminded of how precious these ordinary moments are. I suppose that is why I love photography.

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Andy’s mother Tata became a draftee in the war on drugs the first time she went to prison for attempting to sell crack cocaine to support her own addiction. It was the ’80s and Governor Rockefeller’s response to the national climate was to stiffen prison sentences in New York State. Possession of crack cocaine could now carry a life sentence. Tata’s arrest made collateral damage of Andy’s childhood. One day, in the second grade, he returned home to the news that his mother would be gone for four years. Ten months later, chronic truancy landed Andy in the office of a Board of Education psychiatrist. "School Phobic" was the Board’s official diagnosis. Andy refused to attend classes or stay the full day in school if he did manage to get there. It was explained that this is common among children who have had trauma occur in their houses while they were absent. The doctor said "Children worry what will happen to their parents when they are not around and feel the need to stay home to protect them." Eventually Andy’s school record got him a spot in a juvenile detention facility in Upstate New York, five hours away from his family in Brooklyn. The 18 months that Andy was in the facility and the three sporadic years that he spent in New York City Public Schools account for Andy’s entire academic career. Now, at 20 years old, the resiliency that Andy has mustered after repeated tragedy is his education.

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Eight-year-old Andy was already a legend on Dodworth Street by the time a social worker slipped a note underneath the family’s apartment door, charging his mother, Tata, with educational neglect. Andy was the tousle-headed street kid who could jump over five people with his bike, turn an abandoned building into a shelter for a dozen wild dogs, and stand toe-to-toe with any of the savvy young drug hustlers that worked the doorway of the corner store with his mother. Tales of Tata’s escapades—her knack for eluding the narcotics squad, her ability to fake an asthma attack convincing enough to get her released from a pair of handcuffs, her refusal to live by any authority, even when it came in the form of a gun-toting supplier whose crack she had smoked instead of sold—provided Andy with a street pedigree that established him on the block before he was old enough to walk.

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Tata met Angel in a drug rehab after she had been arrested for dealing to support her habit. She had a long record of drug related charges, so the two-year treatment program came with a high alternative sentence of 5-10 years if she failed to complete it. Tata’s joy at having found true love at last had similar conditions. When Angel’s terminal diagnosis got him an early release from the program, Tata decided to trade years of her life for whatever time remained with Angel.

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Tata was already a fifteen -year veteran of the United States War on Drugs when she traded a decade of freedom to fight with her husband during the final days of his battle with liver cancer.

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In 1996 I moved from Miami, Florida to Brooklyn, New York to begin pursuing my Master in Photography at N.Y.U.  The education that i got came not from the lecture hall but from the streets in my new neighborhood. During the seven years that I lived on the border of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant I photographed, wrote about and made video recordings of the families on my block. The reporting resulted in a book and web publication entitled Money Power Respect: Pictures of My Neighborhood. In 2002 i bought a house less than a mile away from where the pictures where made, I began other projects but continued to photograph and film the families in Money Power Respect. The years that followed Money Power Respect publication have been critical in the lives of children on the brink of adulthood and for parents who are always dangerously close to the edge.

I now feel that Money Power Respect serves only as the introduction of my neighbors to the larger world and that the real story somehow began after the publication of the book was well underway. I felt a responsibility to document the results of the stories I began to tell in the book and the web has made possible the idea that publications no longer need to be finite.The result of continuing to record the stories over the last four years has been edited into a series of mini movies called Back on The Block.

Back on The Block is a premiere story blog on what we hope would be a new forum for community journalism. The Raw File was inspired by the need to provide open ended means of publication for long term documentary projects which might not be possible in traditional print media. We hope that these stories will provoke discussion and a way of viewing personal stories in a larger social contest. In the future The Raw File hopes to host stories by independent storytellers and producers with the passion for informing emotional intelligence.

Please subscribe to our newsletter and check the Submit Stories page if you are interested.

-Brenda Ann Kenneally