As media editor at EV, my job is to find the images, videos, and other media that bring our entries to life. In some cases, it can be very hard to find even one good image. For example, in our recent entry on Hannah Lee Corbin, I ended up with a picture that could possibly be Corbin, as a baby. (Don’t trust what a Google image search tells you—that portrait is of Dolley Madison.)
In our recent series about urban renewal in Virginia, I found myself with the opposite problem. City housing authorities and offices of urban renewal and redevelopment kept excellent records of their projects, often with thousands of images. I spent days digging through these collections, trying to find the best illustrative picture.
It was tempting, with such a bounty of images, to draw exclusively from these government sources. They had more pictures than I could possibly use, all perfectly on topic. But I noticed something. These pictures tended to reinforce the government narrative around urban renewal. The photographers were seeking out blemishes in the neighborhoods they were capturing, trying to prove that the area in question was a “slum.” Many photographs show the BACK of houses. They emphasize chipped paint, trash piles, wandering livestock (now in vogue amongst urban farm-to-table types), and outhouses. Not the parts of your house you would necessarily show off to a guest.
Olney and Lewis Streets, Norfolk (Norfolk Redevelopment & Housing Authority)
When I looked at sources from people who lived in neighborhoods targeted for urban renewal, there was a huge difference. Children smile and play, businesses serve their communities, and houses appear a little worn, but well-loved. I found that family photos and artwork by local artists often captured the vibrancy of a neighborhood.
Saker’s Grocery, Roanoke (Collection of David Ramey Jr.)
Gainsboro, Roanoke, Debutante Ball (Gainsboro Branch of Roanoke Public Libraries)
Finding and getting permission to use family photographs and copyrighted artwork is a lot harder than pulling from a government website’s digital archive. Government offices have people who are paid to go through the time-consuming process of cataloging photographs, digitizing them, and sharing permissions with people like me. Regular folks, not so much. It is easy for the local perspective to get lost.
It is always essential to pay attention to one’s sources, but I found in our urban renewal entries the significance was particularly stark. My hope is that by drawing from a variety of perspectives, I have been able to do justice to a complicated and significant subject.
Thank you so much for this diligence and bringing this perspective to our attention. What a great traveling exhibit it would make! How could it also be applied to rural Virginia? And how does this speak to family and neighborhood resilience! What hidden art can come to view?!
All very interesting.
Fabulous! I love this story. The perspective of evaluating sources carefully is such an important topic today. What a great model of not just taking the first thing you find, the easiest road, but finding something that matches what you are truly trying to accomplish. A great example for us!
I also love the vision and art of the future of urban renewal. As an educator, I can see a classroom where a unit is designed for students to use this post and inquiry to think about picturing the future of their own communities. Such a wonderful hopeful idea in difficult times. I have shared your post on my Facebook page and will also share with my teacher workshop audience. So many great things here! Thank you!
Great job in humanizing these neighborhoods and providing an alternative perspective on places that were dismissed as examples of “urban blight” that needed to be razed. So important that you went beyond the official records to portray the vibrant life that existed in those places often marked for extinction.
Bravo!
Your experience mirrors mine in Roanoke when in the early 1990s I went looking for our housing authority’s photographs of the estimated 1,600 homes wiped out during urban renewal. The authority claimed that nearly all had been thrown out, but they did manage to send me several pictures of the most dilapidated buildings (as you say, to support their narrative). I had been told by a national source that housing authorities were required to photograph every structure eliminated, but our authority said theirs were long-gone. My photography partner and I worked our way around that by inviting former residents of the destroyed neighborhoods to bring pictures of their long-ago homes to an event at their branch of the YMCA. (We ran invitations in my newspaper and in Roanoke’s Black weekly newspaper, explaining that we would take pictures of their pictures at the YMCA and they could take them back home, avoiding any possible losses of pictures if we borrowed them.) I remember well that sunny Saturday afternoon. Several people brought whole albums of photos and laid them out on long tables. Old friends gathered around to share in the memories depicted in those pictures. We saw toddlers playing with a garden hose, whole street scenes of handsome houses later torn down.