Family Portraits with Maya

I am currently developing a project on nannies and domestic workers in collaboration with Domestic Workers United, an organization fighting for a Bill of Rights which would demand basic worker protections like sick pay, health care coverage, severance pay, and overtime pay. Maya is the full time nanny for the family that baby-sit for and she has graciously let me follow her with my camera when she is nannying. This past weekend I went to her home in Woodside, Queens to take some family portraits for her as a thank you for all of her help. She fed me the best Tibetan food and I had such a great time with her two adorable kids Tenzin and Yang-Duin (who have their own babysitter while she takes care of three kids in manhattan).

I will share shots of the Nanny project, but here are some of the family shots...

Headshots with my sister!

Christy is so beautiful. I love her. I love that she lives in New York because seeing her makes me happy. :D
I took free headshots for her this week and she is lending me some business clothes for the Reynolds trip to Washington D.C. this weekend. Sharing is caring!

Photographer Chris Jordan comes to NYU via Reynolds Speakers Series

 

 

 

The amazing photographer Chris Jordan came to NYU last week and I had the opportunity to listen to his talk and each lunch with him (along with the other members of my Reynolds Cohort).

Here is a short bit of the blog post for Reynolds that I wrote about his work:
http://wagner.nyu.edu/reynolds/2010/02/to-visualize-a-different-reali.html

"As a photographer, I am incredibly moved at the ability of his photography to take abstract statistics, ideas, and places and make me see and feel them. The power of a visual representation cannot be exaggerated. If we can visualize the enormity of the problem, it activates our ability to imagine a different way. It is when we begin to expand our imaginations of the way the world our world is that we can begin to visualize a different reality.

It may seem that our two different styles of photography are opposite- my work strives to be intensely individual, focusing on one person and one story at a time while Jordan's work looks at the overarching whole, showing the effects of millions of people. I believe, however, that they are indeed part of one narrative: the consequences of forgetting our interconnectivity as humans. My work aims to put humanity back at the center of the discourse- we must never let the huge and overwhelming discourses of ideology take precedence over people. Jordan's work inspires us to consider our practices as pieces of a whole, to never consider our lives in isolation. He often brings together fragmented materials that could never actually exist in only one place. His images remind us that we must mentally tie our habits to their consequences, it is when we lose that connection and think of our daily actions as singular and small that we also forget our interconnectivity as humans."

check out more of his work at: www.chrisjordan.com