Michael Kamber photographed internationally for The New York Times from 2002 to 2012 and is a co-founder of the Bronx Documentary Center. His book âPhotojournalists on Warâ is an oral history of the Iraq war as recounted by those who documented it from the front lines. An exhibition of portraits he made in the Bronx â" grouped with portraits made in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq â" opens Wednesday evening at the Bronx Art Space. He spoke with James Estrin this week about that exhibition. The conversation has been edited.
This is an unusual grouping of photos that youâre exhibiting. What was it that drew you to making the overseas portraits?
I was interested in taking non-conflict photos when I was working in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over Africa. I wanted pictures that you could actually make some kind of connection with the people.
Photojournalists try to humanize people every day, but especially when weâre covering news, itâs tough. People get reduced to the person being carted off to a hospital or the person shooting the gun or the person grieving at a funeral. Or people waving a clenched fist at a demonstration. These are pictures that Iâve taken hundreds of times. They begin to feel a little bit too impersonal, somehow.
I think that good portraits are about having someone look you in the eyes or looking into somebodyâs eyes and slowing down the process. Itâs a very slow process. Iâm talking to people. Iâm engaging them. Itâs a very different experience than running through the streets with a camera and a motor drive, shooting off lots of frames with the action happening around you.
When youâre shooting the action, you donât really know the people or what itâs about. I wanted to get to know the people in some way â" visually, personally, in whatever way â" and the camera was to some degree a device for that.
You knew the Bronx; youâd photographed a lot in the Bronx. Now itâs your home. Are these portraits also a way of getting to know your neighbors?
Definitely. A lot of the pictures in my Bronx series were taken on my block. Theyâre mostly people that I know; theyâre people that I talk to every day. Itâs a way of interacting; itâs a way of exploring. I give portraits back to people and they put them up on their walls and we have conversations about them.
Tell me about the connection between your earlier photos and the Bronx photos.
When I was in Afghanistan and Iraq then, I was always thinking and wondering about the relationship of people in these war zones to people back home in the U.S. â" particularly in the Bronx, a place I hung out and worked in for many years. The Bronx is the type of place where a lot of people join the military and end up in Iraq and Afghanistan, being shot at and shooting back.
Iâm still trying to figure out what the connection is. When I got back, I started doing portraits here and trying to blend them together with my overseas portraits and figure out how these peopleâs lives are connected.
Well, theyâre certainly connected by the fact that youâre photographing there in the Bronx and that you used to be photographing in Iraq and Africa and Afghanistan.
Well, at the end of the day that may be the only connection.
Youâve spent most of the last 15 years working overseas. How did your connection to the Bronx begin?
I was born in Maine, but my family is from the Bronx. My aunts and uncles all came here when they immigrated. Some of them were born here. I lived on Willis Avenue and 136th Street from 1986 to â91.
The Bronx is where I learned to photograph. I moved up here when I was just starting out. I had dropped out of art school and had no money. I was working construction. I came up to the Bronx and I would go out and photograph in the neighborhood and walk around on Sunday mornings and photograph landscapes and talk with people and do portraits. There were a lot of demonstrations up here. There was a lot of social activism happening up here. I would shoot demonstrations every week, and then I would go downtown and sell the pictures for $25.
I became a photographer in the South Bronx. I shot my first photo essay here. Itâs really where I learned to shoot, right in this neighborhood.
The Bronx has changed a lot since the the late â80s, when you first lived there.
Itâs changed tremendously. Iâve got some before and after pictures from the 1980s and from 2013 of the same places in the show. The transformation is astonishing. There were hundreds by thousands of acres of empty, open land up here. It was land returning to nature. You could walk through lots that were a quarter mile long with no buildings. Just rubble and burned-out cars and empty buildings. And now, those buildings are full of people and thereâs a shopping center where there was a grassy lot.
Itâs pretty extraordinary, because theyâve done it without really gentrifying the Bronx. Where I live itâs mostly working-class Latinos, African-Americans and Africans. When you see these pictures from the â80s, itâs just empty. Thereâs a long way to go, but itâs really come back.
I think the city has done a good job. I think the community has done a good job. I think itâs been a real successful story, and I donât think people talk enough about it or really know it. I talk to people all the time and theyâre like: âOh, the Bronx. Itâs terrible up there.â It still has that â80s reputation, and it has gotten much, much better. People still donât want to come up here. They still think itâs like the bad old days.
You not only moved to the Bronx and bought your building, but you pretty much set down roots. You also started the Bronx Documentary Center.
Right, right. Well, that was always the dream, to have a place to show great photography and films â" to diversify and to disseminate the things that were interesting to us to different audiences.
Once I found the building, all the frustrations that Iâd had for years and years about documentary work and getting it out into the community sorted out.
When you say getting it out into the community, do you mean showing the photos where you take them?
Itâs about showing the pictures. For instance, our next show is about immigration. A lot of the places that this work is generally shown is in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and suburban communities. But many of the immigrants actually live in the South Bronx or in small towns across America, and we also need to show it in these communities.
Thereâs documentary photography being done in the South Bronx, but itâs not shown here. Itâs shown downtown. We want to show it up here, and we also want to include the people who live up here in making it work. We need to have a next generation of filmmakers who are from the South Bronx. And thatâs something that weâre working on.
âRadical Resurrection and Portraits of Survivalâ will be on view at the Bronx Art Space through Aug. 30.
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