Placemakers
Can artists make a difference in a community? Do art and politics mix?
Mel Rosenthal
Synopsis by David Reed
Mel Rosenthal spoke about his involvement in art, photography and in a variety of social activities he has engaged in throughout his life.
Rosenthal received a PhD in American Literature, studying the impact of alienation on American writers. After a stint teaching English at Vassar College, he went to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, finding work there as a medical photographer. (Unhappy with his circumstances, he not only quit his teaching job, but went clear across the globe to Africa.) His job of using photography as a tool for preventive and diagnostic health care came as a way of maximizing care in a situation with a small number of doctors by helping people to diagnose themselves.
When the war in Southern Africa got hotter and reached Tanzania, Rosenthal decided to return to the U.S. He ended up teaching at Empire State College and setting up a literacy program for health and social workers in the South Bronx. He was dismayed to find, having left Africa to get away from a war, "what could have been called war" in the Bronx. The area suffered, on average, 33 fires in a given night. Rosenthal began photographing empty lots and burnt out buildings, thinking that if he showed people what was going on there, then perhaps things could be changed. He didn't think of it as art.
He began photographing people, starting with a guy named Eddie who he later found out had robbed banks. (Eddie put the word out in the neighborhood to leave Mel alone). He gave pictures to those he photographed to help break down barriers between artist and audience. Rosenthal's primary audience was in the neighborhood where he photographed and he began exhibiting his work in shops, bars or whatever local venues he could find. "This was the height of my art career," he said. At one point, he had four openings in a month. His "illusion", as he called it, was that if there were lots of nice pictures everywhere, then there would be a sense of community and that would save the neighborhood. Unfortunately, Rosenthal said, this didn't really work.
Rosenthal also spoke about the importance, as he saw it, of showing the vitality of this working class neighborhood. He was occasionally frustrated in that people in the neighborhood would ask him why he was making the neighborhood look so bad (because the area was so run down), or why he was making them look so dark skinned. This raised issues of how people see themselves or would like to be seen.
As the economic situation worsened for Puerto Rican immigrants who had been living in the Bronx, many returned to their native land. Rosenthal, interested in following their lives, traveled to Puerto Rico and photographed extensively in a squatter community there. Many of the houses reminded him of the Bronx, "especially the plastic furniture covers." There were even, as in his uncle's apartment, "plastic covers over the really good plastic covers."
A bill was eventually passed in Puerto Rico giving the land to the squatters, but it was vetoed by the governor. One morning, heavily armed paramilitary SWAT teams came in and forcibly removed the squatters. Residents were accused afterwards, by the government, of killing police. But after Rosenthal's photos were introduced as evidence showing the police with shotguns (they had claimed that only the squatters had shotguns, but in fact, Rosenthal said, it was the other way around), the case was immediately dropped. It is interesting that now, he pointed out, with the advent of Photoshop, photos cannot be used as evidence in Puerto Rico.
Rosenthal showed photos from an exhibition of this work, telling of a man who came up to him upon seeing the show and saying "You're the custodian of our memory." To Rosenthal, this was an indication that even in the age of Photoshop, photos can in fact serve as evidence.
Another project Rosenthal spoke about involved a sister city project between Tipitapa, Nicaragua and the Upper West Side in New York City where he organized many shows, in churches and schools, of his Nicaraguan photography, combined with messages to viewers written by those depicted in the photos.
Rosenthal also went to Vietnam with a writer to do a story on the effect of the Vietnam war on the Vietnamese, focusing on the cancerous effects of Agent Orange. He spoke of his frustration, upon coming back, that their sponsors Newsweek and The Village Voice would not publish the story. Later, they went to Rolling Stone and Playboy, but to no avail. Rosenthal spoke of the importance of this work in terms of "having our own histories;" of not leaving history to the victors.
Currently, Rosenthal is completing an exhibition entitled "Refuge" for the New York Historical Society about different kinds of refugees in New York State. He spoke of his close involvement over a period of many years with families he worked together with on the project and of the importance of not just parachuting in somewhere to do a story. "One should," he said, "give back to the people."
Rosenthal was asked why he photographs. To which he responded that it is, for him, a selfish thing. "Its so much fun; so moving." He really does, he said, believe it makes a difference. A small difference, but a difference nonetheless. Rosenthal ended by encouraging us to fight back. "Though everything in this society is geared to teaching you the opposite, it’s not a waste of time."
Analysis by Roddy MacInnes
Mel Rosenthal's black and white documentary photographs are a refreshing departure within the debate to define what is "public art." Working in the "straight" documentary style, his images are potent reminders of the significance that this photographic genre possesses. With an extremely focused vision, his objectives seem clear, to document the goodness he finds in his fellow human beings.
His photographic career began serendipitously in Africa where he traveled to escape a career in education. Working as a medical photographer with victims of civil war, he soon realized the strength photography possessed and that the medium could be used by him, as an instrument of social change. A number of his friends were murdered as the war in South Africa became more intense. One day he was ordered to photograph the autopsy of his good friend, the artist Tingatinga. He decided to leave Africa.
Back in the States and teaching at Empire State College, he began a photographic documentary project investigating the decline of the South Bronx as a community. He has a personal relationship with the Bronx because this is where he grew up. We are shown a photograph taken in his bedroom at the house where he grew up. The building has been destroyed by one of ten thousand fires that burned throughout the area during its decline. There was a deep sense of sadness in this image. A room full of childhood memories now just an empty shell sitting in a landscape of despair. How could one's life not have been affected by this experience?
The Bronx of his youth had been transformed from a community, once full of life and vitality, to a disaster scene. Most people would have turned and run but Mel Rosenthal is an optimist. He chose to look for what life remained in this neglected community. He wanted to know why the Bronx was burning down. During the following years, he produced an in-depth and moving photographic portrait of the people still living in the Bronx. He was the unofficial photographer-in-residence making a record of a forgotten community.
It is obvious from the faces staring back from the photographs that the residents of the Bronx appreciated Mel and understood the significance of what he was doing. He had their co-operation. His work was exhibited in a local pizza shop and in a bar. In fact, at the height of the project, he was having three or four exhibitions a month in the neighborhood. This work is being published in the book, In the South Bronx of America, by Curbstone Press in 1999.
Many of the displaced residents of the Bronx returned to their homeland, Puerto Rico, only to fall victim once again to the greed of landowners and politicians. Mel Rosenthal went to Puerto Rico to visit his friends. He planned to stay only a few days but found himself caught up in their new struggle and stayed to produce another moving photographic portrait of a marginalized community. His book Villa Sin Miedo Preseute, that he did with the writer John Brentlinger, tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of that community.
I found Mel Rosenthal to be a man with an acute awareness of the inequalities that exist in society. He has a passion for humanity and, through photography, struggles to understand what happens to communities reconstructed or destroyed in the name of progress. As a boy growing up in the Bronx, he was oblivious to the forces shaping up to destroy his own community. History was to reveal that the Bronx fell victim to the greed of politicians and local businessmen who had plans to replace homes with factories, to replace a community with enterprise zones. Employing the strengths of black and white documentary photography, Mel Rosenthal's mission is to replace despair with hope.