 Summer 2001 American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
In the South Bronx of America
During the 1970s, Mel Rosenthal worked in an area of the Bronx targeted by city officials to become an enterprise zone, an area where factories would be built and their owners given special tax privileges. It has now become clear that it was with these officials' tacit consent that the arsonists' torches were allowed to do the work usually performed by bulldozers and wrecking crews--at a fraction of the financial cost. The human price was painfully high.
Mel Rosenthal, professor of art and cultural studies at Empire State Collegae, SUNY, co-founded Impact Visuals and the Triage Project a collective of doctors, photographers, and writers that documents health care and homelessness in New York City.
"Mel Rosenthal's In the South Bronx of America updates the great Harlem Project of the thirties--as a photographic diary of what the city has done to afflict its poor, of how many of them survive, and how some don't. At once a personal visual account, and with its illuminating texts, and an historical survey." --Max Kozloff, photographer "The shame of our cities is here given an identifiable human face, which sometimes even breaks into a smile. Mel Rosenthal, wise enough to question photography's ability to effect change, registers the willful destruction of an entire community. Then he reminds us that kids in the burned-out Bronx still play in the midst of devastation while adults search for the regular lives that society and government have made virtually impossible. These photographs, well seen and well taken, are both outraged and generous, recording persistent glimmers of the human spirit amid the rubble of injustice." -- Vicki Goldberg, critic
--From the publisher 
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When photographer Rosenthal began to document this tragedy, he
discovered that the people in the neighborhood did not have pictures
of themselves that did justice to their spirit and courage. Wanting
to be one of the custodians of the neighborhood's memory,
Rosenthal began to make portraits of everyone who still lived
in the area of Bathgate Avenue. He made pictures which he hoped
would show both the tragedy and heroism of their daily lives.
Rosenthal's intimate images offer an insightful view of
how an innocent neighborhood was willfully and callously destroyed
for political advantage and economic gain.
"In a way Mel Rosenthal was lucky. He was a member of a
generation that thought it was a good, even joyous, political
idea to put its brains, energy, labor at the service of the people.
So he did." --Grace Paley, from the Preface
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