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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}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 “Photojournalists on War†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 you’re 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 we’re covering news, it’s 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 I’ve 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 somebody’s eyes and slowing down the process. It’s a very slow process. I’m talking to people. I’m engaging them. It’s 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 you’re shooting the action, you don’t really know the people or what it’s 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; you’d photographed a lot in the Bronx. Now it’s 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. They’re mostly people that I know; they’re people that I talk to every day. It’s a way of interacting; it’s a way of exploring. I give portraits back to people and they put them up on their walls and we have conversations about them.
Michael Kamber A journalist and student in her home in Baghdad. 2011.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.
I’m 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 people’s lives are connected.
Well, they’re certainly connected by the fact that you’re 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.
Michael Kamber Looking south from 161st Street in the South Bronx in 1990, toward the Bronx night court.You’ve 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 ’91.
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. It’s really where I learned to shoot, right in this neighborhood.
The Bronx has changed a lot since the the late ’80s, when you first lived there.
It’s changed tremendously. I’ve 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 there’s a shopping center where there was a grassy lot.
It’s pretty extraordinary, because they’ve done it without really gentrifying the Bronx. Where I live it’s mostly working-class Latinos, African-Americans and Africans. When you see these pictures from the ’80s, it’s just empty. There’s a long way to go, but it’s really come back.
I think the city has done a good job. I think the community has done a good job. I think it’s been a real successful story, and I don’t think people talk enough about it or really know it. I talk to people all the time and they’re like: “Oh, the Bronx. It’s terrible up there.†It still has that ’80s reputation, and it has gotten much, much better. People still don’t want to come up here. They still think it’s like the bad old days.
Michael Kamber Looking south from 161st Street in the South Bronx in 2013.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 I’d 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?
It’s 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.
There’s documentary photography being done in the South Bronx, but it’s not shown here. It’s 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 that’s something that we’re working on.
“Radical Resurrection and Portraits of Survival†will be on view at the Bronx Art Space through Aug. 30.
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