Written by Darriel McBride Growing up as a bi-racial woman, during the early 2000s to present, has come with its own set of challenges. Despite growing up in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world, I was born into a mixed family and culture that struggles with anti-Blackness. While being half […]
Story Submitted by Coda Rayo-Garza This one picture of me as a child speaks volumes about who I am now and where I come from. It represents the fire that burns in me to pursue justice and a better world for all. I had no idea how many answers lived in a photograph. Growing up […]
The story below has been shared with Family Pictures USA by Guenevere Crum. Her journey to find her family history led her through libraries, across the country, and over the Atlantic to track down photos and family members. Her efforts spanning decades, we present to you a snippet of her findings: Four images hanging on […]
Thomas and Ana Flávia in front of the library on the Federal University of Brasilia Campus Last month I went to Brazil to keynote the opening of the “Plural Knowledge: The Social Relevance of the Public University” Conference at the Federal University of Brasilia, as well as to conduct a two day Family Pictures Community […]
By Barbara Tyner Hall Florida’s southwestern coast is made up of a group of mangrove keys known as the Ten Thousand Islands. Chokoloskee Island and Everglades City are located eighty miles west of Miami just off of the Tamiami Trail This is the western gateway to the Everglades National Park. Chokoloskee is one of the […]
Viktor holds a photo of his family. During his time as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College – back in 2016 – Thomas had the opportunity to meet artist Viktor Witkowski and professor Katie Hornstein over dinner. Both brought family photos to share that night for an impromptu photo share session. Katie had a print […]
Written by Darriel McBride for Family Pictures USA For many members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community, National Coming Out Day is the perfect time to celebrate their own stories while raising awareness about the LGBTQ+ experience. Proclaiming one’s identity is a deeply personal and often challenging experience for LGBTQ+ individuals. Regardless […]
By John D. Sutter There’s a simple problem at the heart of the climate crisis: We don’t live long enough to really feel it. Academics call this “generational amnesia” or “shifting baseline syndrome.” The Earth operates on a timeframe of centuries and millennia. We humans are here for just a few decades. That makes it […]
By Evan Trine I’ve been working on this body of work for the last year or so. It developed slowly after stripping down previous bodies of work until I realized that the source imagery I’d been using was actually the most interesting, valuable part of my process. I haven’t completely landed on the language around […]
Zulaika Quintero, Jose Quintero and Elva Quintero We had the opportunity to meet Zulaika Quintero through our photo-share in Southwest Florida. As the principal of a local public charter school, she has tailored the school’s curriculum to meet the needs of the children in her community. “Everything is taught in both languages and that enables […]
Thomas recently connected with Rodney Freeman, creator of the platform Black Male Archives via Linked In. Intrigued by his work, we invited Rodney to share more some of his personal family archives and tell us about his history with photo preservation. I’m a librarian with a passion for saving/preserving pictures. I’ve been a librarian for […]
If we look closely, we can see traces of our ancestors in our faces, our personalities, our genes. Our relatives, the people in their lives, and their circumstances became embedded in their bodies, shaping the way they moved and thought and lived. They then passed some of those things on to us, just as their […]
The Life of a 107-year-old Detroit Home (r to l) Annette Baka, Maryanne Porzondek (mother), and Nancy Taylor (sister). I wanted to be involved in Family Pictures USA in order to show how a 107-year-old home survived, transformed, and brought two families together that will be bonded forever. The house at 5528 Moran Street has survived […]
By Philip Rosenbaum Joseph C. Rosenbaum Producing a five minute video about my father and how he survived the Holocaust was an experience I will forever cherish. The idea came to me on the first day of our two-day seminar, Re-Imagining the Family Album with Professor Thomas Allen Harris at Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts Program. On that first day, […]
A Family Memoir By Rudean Leinaeng Rudean holds a portrait of her grandparents, Albert & Evelyn She was beautiful, cultured, and clairvoyant–the pampered daughter of a middle-class colored family; he was handsome and hard-nosed – a laborer with little formal education. How they met and fell in love is the beginning of this family narrative. […]
I met writer Doug Cooper Spencer via Facebook and asked him to consider writing a piece. A few days later he sent me his essay, ‘The Language of Light’, a meditation on the power of photo literacy and stories buried behind the images. Below Doug shares some of his photos from his hometown Lincoln Heights, Ohio with Digital Diaspora […]
Albert Sidney Johnson (1880 – 1947) was born in Lexington Virginia, the eldest of five children. Both of his parents had been born into slavery. His father, James, worked as a cook at the Virginia Military Institute; while his mother, Emma, worked as a housekeeper at Washington College. Al attended primary school for only four years before […]
