Back on The Block
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.
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-Brenda Ann Kenneally