Digital Artifact

http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html

Hello,

This is a web site my father has been working on for years. I've seen his work in a variety of static forms, gallery shows, magazines, books and newspapers, but this site makes the vast content much more accessible and contextualized. To quickly summarize the larger project behind invinciblecities.com, my old man has been systematically documenting the physical changes in some of America's most impoverished neighborhoods. Over 30 years, he has documents, East Brooklyn, East Harlem, the South Bronx, Camden, South Philadelphia, Gary IN, the South Side of Chicago, Detroit, Oakland CA and Los Angeles. Often taking pictures from the same spot year after year, he has created a visual record that illustrates economic, sociological and political shifts in certain corners of the American landscape. As a child I often joined him on adventures through these strange landscapes, and came to understand his work as primarily a record, not theses on poverty or inequality in American. In the '80's and '90's he had to go slide by slide to create a coherent point about architecture, ethnic shifts or local iconography.

While some online publishers and universities have displayed specific content on their web sites, invinciblecities.com is the first time that he has been able to tag photos according to their date and content and create an environment for exploring the images. What makes this so profound for me is that his apartment is essentially two large rooms completely lined with bookshelves full of albums of negatives. Heaps of slides, light boxes and magnifying glasses were the only tools he could use to organize this archive until slide scanning and back up memory became affordable. Now, with the help of some excellent web designers, he has a single site that ties together all these tiny bits of information together into a vast visual database.

Enjoy,

Charlie