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Photo Exhibit Battles Misconceptions About City's Public Housing Tenants

By Nikhita Venugopal | September 4, 2014 3:31pm
 "We the People" is a photography exhibition featuring photos and interviews with public housing tenants in New York.
We The People
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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — A photojournalism exhibit that focuses on public housing residents in New York is hoping to debunk the notoriety surrounding the projects.

Rico Washington and Shino Yanagawa, both freelance journalists, have spent a year interviewing more than 50 Latino and African-American tenants of the New York City Housing Authority buildings for their new project “We The People: The Citizens of NYCHA in Photos + Words,” which opens this month.

Through stories and portraits, the duo sought to “change the perception” and dispel glaring stereotypes of widespread criminal activity, drug use and broken homes in public housing, Washington said.

Twenty residents have been chosen for the upcoming exhibit, which will open Sept. 26 at the Brooklyn Historical Society at 128 Pierrepoint St., but Washington and Yanagawa hope to eventually publish a book with all the stories.

”It’s the myth that nothing of value comes from public housing,” said Washington, 38, who grew up in public housing in Washington D.C and has previously written for Ebony.com, WaxPoetics and Okayplayer.

Yanagawa, a Japanese photographer whose work has appeared in GQ Japan and ELLE Japan, moved to New York in 2004 and spent a few months living in an uptown public housing complex with her first husband’s family.

Before this, her only experience of the projects came from rap videos that she had watched on MTV as a teenager.

“Wow this is reality,” she recalled thinking. “This is not like in the music videos.”

Yanagawa often visits the public houses in Brownsville, where her husband’s family lives. Reports of gang violence and shootings can often isolate the buildings from the rest of the city and push some residents to move out, she said.

“Housing projects, to me, is somebody’s house,” said Yanagawa, 39.

The duo found their characters through referrals and word-of-mouth in almost two-dozen NYCHA houses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx between late 2009 and early 2011.

Several stories feature everyday residents, like a 111-year-old woman who lives at East New York’s Vandalia Houses and helped put her four nieces through college. They’ve also interviewed some former and notable tenants like photographer Jamel Shabazz and author and director Nelson George.

“These people have contributed so much to society at large,” Washington said.

“We The People: The Citizens of NYCHA in Photos + Words” opens Sept. 26 to April 2015 at Brooklyn Historical Society, located at 128 Pierrepont St. in Brooklyn Heights.