Bringing Invisible Stories to Instagram Followers

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A year after Radcliffe Roye went to New Orleans to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina, his archives were crammed with hundreds of 4-by-5 images that sat unseen and unpublished. He wonders now whether, if Instagram had existed at the time, he would have had a better opportunty to share the voices of the people working to rebuild their city.

Last year, when Hurricane Sandy ravaged Breezy Point, Queens, he was ready. With only his smartphone, he uploaded a stream of haunting and raw images of the devastation to Instagram, the photo-sharing site, where he now has nearly 27,000 followers. A few days later, The New Yorker came calling.

Telling stories this way has always fascinated Mr. Roye, a 43-year-old Jamaican photographer who cares deeply about “the forgotten man” â€" the diverse, blue-collar residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He chats up people on the street and, with his smartphone and some processing with a filter app, takes their portrait.

“My Instagram account has become a way for me to question ! everything around me,” said Mr. Roye, who has uploaded roughly 2,000 images in the past year. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people’s faces â€" forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.”

Ruddy Roye“William Frazer.”

His subject’s faces often dominate the square frame, their eyes glinting. The closeness is intentional, he said: a way to provoke his viewers to question their thoughts on race, gender and income inequality. Each image is accompanied by a description of the subject or location, followed by a sequence of hashtags to make it easier for his viewers to follow each of his series. His most popular searches to date are #iaaman, #relevance, #poverty, #blackportraiture, #elements and #queenspride.

Mr. Roye says his work depends on developing relationships based on trust, which means spending time with subjects to discover their personal stories. By the time he asks them if he can take their photograph, the bond has been solidified. He is almost never turned away.

Last week he uploaded a vivid image (below) of a young girl in tears, gripping her father with her small hands. A caption on a previous image explained it: “A distraught father strolls into the shadows of Washington Park (Fort Greene Park) hours after learning from the courts that he was not allowed to go back home to be with his daughter. ‘I am a childless father,’ he whispered, fighting back tears.”

Immediately after Mr. Roye posted that photo, a stream of his followers began commenting.

Ruddy Roye “Jesse â€" Brooklyn.”

“I want people to think about Jesse tonight and what he is going through,” he said of the father. “We all have been Jesse in some form in our lives, experiencing loss and despair.”

Mr. Roye did not set out to be a photographer while growing up in Jamaica; his mother did not consider it a proper profession. He started his journalism career writing stories for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer, but he was dissatisfied with the pictures that accompanied his stories. He decided to take them himself.

Within months, he landed his first photo assignment â€" to document the many squatters who had built makeshift homes on top of a discontinued train line running 120 miles from Montego Bay to Kingston. He wound up walking the line, literally.

It still has not been an easy journey.

“A photojournalist is not a job that a child is told to be,” said Mr. Roye, whooriginally planned to be an English teacher. “When I go back home, I ask photographers if they have a body of work. Many of them, studio and event photographers, have no idea what I am talking about.”

Mr. Roye moved to Brooklyn in 2000, bringing with him his slides from the railroad project. Within a few months, a friend helped him secure an interview with the photography department at The Associated Press. When he showed the editors his slides, many of them were stunned.

“I remember one of the editors saying to me, ‘If the photojournalists in Jamaica could photograph the way they photograph cricket, your country would have some of the best photojournalists in the world,’ ” he said.

That interview led to a freelancing contract with The A.P., along with work for publications like Ebony and Jet magazine. In 2002, he traveled back to Jamaica to photograph fashion trends of the underground dancehall movement for Vogue.

Mr. Roye said he considered his images on Instagra! m an exte! nsion of the work that has always moved him. It’s just that, now, he has a platform to reach a broader audience.

He will quickly challenge those who say smartphone photography is not real photojournalism, though he has no intention of abandoning his digital or film cameras. For Mr. Roye, it has always been about the story behind the image and how the image is shared.

A few months ago, he got a chest tattoo of a caricature of himself peering into a 4-by-5 film camera. Someone graciously used Mr. Roye’s smartphone to take a photograph of the moment.

Which, of course, he immediately shared with his followers on Instagram.

Ruddy Roye“Image Vendor.”

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