PROJECT AND DEVELOP
Anticipatory Nostalgia
With: Elisa Silva, Marcel Merwin, and
Mattapan community members Maxime, Fatima, Leroy, Philmore, Jonathan and Marian
In mid-January, we logged on to a Zoom call. A small menagerie of faces projected across our laptop screens. Pinned to the right were developers, with attendees filling two pages worth of virtual space. We buried ourselves behind black screens, just posting our first names. Responding to the urgent need for more housing in the Greater Boston Area, the architects and developers unfurled plans for a new, one-hundred-percent affordable housing project in Mattapan. They didn’t get far before attendees started asking questions:
Why didn’t you add more parking?
What will happen to my view?
Have you ever seen Blue Hill Avenue at rush hour?
Don’t just stop by for an hour, come live at my house, come spend a day seeing what I see.
Presented as a critique of the architects and developers who did drive-by site visits, we took this frustrated invitation as a provocation: what if it were possible to s ee what someone else sees? How can we create a wider lens?
Our approach was direct: in April, we distributed disposable cameras to Mattapan community members. Through photographs, neighbors could capture and share their own experiences and perspectives of their home – what they see when they look at Mattapan. With each camera, we included a small notebook with a handful of prompts to help guide participants, and as we explained our agenda we made clear that it was intended to be a fun opportunity to share their voice and vision. While there were a few people who demurred, most residents we talked to were excited and some even signaled that they already knew exactly what they were going to record. We started by handing-off cameras to a small nucleus of people we’d met, and encouraged them to give cameras to their friends. The network expanded as we walked, stopping strangers and asking if they’d like to participate.
Ultimately, a constellation of nearly fifty cameras landed across Mattapan. The Zoom call we attended addressed one of many new projects and developments cropping up in Mattapan, new structures erected with the promise they will increase housing and symptomatically change the cultural make-up of the neighborhood. Most often associated with low-income families and gentrification, the terms project and development are deployed by developers with an air of confidence that masks how their projects are actually projections; their developments are still developing. In other words, the developers’ rhetorical certainty hides the unavoidable uncertainty of building something new: we project the future as we develop over time.
Within the built environment, the developer controls the reins of new construction and new visions for communities, most often outside of their own. The gap between developer and community, in which the architect often waffles, leads to tone-deaf buildings where the needs of the community are neither heard nor met. The affordable units proposed on the Zoom call reflect the work of the architect and developer – based in California – who went through the motions of collecting surveys, but recognize the residents only as data points, not as individuals. Project and Develop shifts the authorship of community development from the blueprints, renderings, and cost analyses of architects and developers to the residents’ own photographic projections both of the disappearing “now” and the emerging future of Mattapan.
Analog photography requires the projection of light on film and the chemical development of an image as printed matter. It’s what you think you will see, rendered over time into a tangible print of what you saw. We think of the developing image in relation to a walk – the slow process of choosing your step, selecting the moment you capture, relying on the response of the mechanical steps to inscribe the image on film. With the limited frames available in the disposable camera, the act of taking a photograph requires deliberation, a trait lost with the apparently endless storage of a digital camera, or more likely, a phone. Twenty-seven images offer twenty-seven chances to record Mattapan.You must slow down, look around, and pay attention.
We initially called the work Anticipatory Nostalgia, a pre-emptive grasp at recording an already fleeting moment. But, as we got cameras back, we saw photos of trash, memories of already transformed buildings, natural beauty, and daily commutes. Preservation was in conversation with a current reality, future wishes, and past desires. Widening the aperture of authorship allowed us to see what we otherwise couldn’t and pushed us to reframe our scope to what is now called Project and Develop: a collective portrait of Mattapan as it is, as it was, and as it could be.
In time for this publication, we received six cameras back. When we picked up the first batch of cameras, we simultaneously handed off two more to senior sewers, who were putting pockets in pants in the event room. Someone at the public computers overheard us describing the process and asked to participate. The invitation to both reflect on and document your own life is powerful, and as projects and developments culturally reshape Mattapan, the analog image offers a meaningful way for community members to develop and project on their own behalf.
The Mattapan Public Library became our informal home base where we assembled, collected, and distributed our camera packets. We also asked participants to drop off completed cameras at the library for us to develop. We invited them to return to the library for a celebratory event where we shared the printed photographs, food, and conversation. It was exciting for us to see posters of the event hanging in the library, where Maurice and the other librarians encouraged and promoted engagement from their regular visitors.
As we unpacked six envelopes of developed photos and spread them the floor, we first noticed what was the same between the one hundred and thirty images: the photos were all taken in daylight, despite a flash on the camera; Blue Hill Avenue made multiple appearances; more than one photographer took pictures of the Mobile Station and the Episcopalian church. Despite instances of shared subject matter and working with the same Fuji cameras, everyone speaks their own language and renders their subjects through their own visual vocabulary. For example, all six photographers took images of cars, but some shot from a distance, others up-close, some blurry, some cropped; everyone has their own approach. The many photographs of streets and parking lots are also a convenient reminder of the demand for more parkingspaces in new developments.
Given the amount of time we spent talking with neighbors about these parking spaces, and more broadly about the changing Mattapan landscape, we were surprised by the difference between our expectations and the photographs that developed. What emerges through the collection of images is a refusal to significantly engage with these new interlopers. Tellingly, there are no photographs of new developments. Instead, individual narratives magnify nuanced corners of the community. In addition to the iconic Simco’s and identifiable Golden Krust Restaurant, there are images of single trees, unnumbered houses, and fence caps. These photographs document details of the neighborhood that we had glossed over in our visits, but these details are meaningful parts of our collaborators’ work. They saw importance and value in what we failed to see.
In compiling these photographs, we assessed both the chemically developed prints and the hi-res digital scans. The hallmark, hazy green tint of the printed image translates across media as a vestige of the analog. It casts a universal spell over the collection, evoking a stuck-in-time, visual nostalgia. This can be both beautiful and serve a larger narrative, such as in Leroy’s wistful photographs of his former places of work, and the now-demolished Police station. As he reflected on a Mattapan of the past, with his subjects shot from a tentative distance, the static tint of the disposable image underlines the ghost-like quality of what remains. But this same, uniform green cast can mute the vibrancy of contemporary life, of the murals Maxime photographed or the painted rocks Jonathan recorded. Like peeking out from behind a fuzzy web or transparent curtain, the bright subjects of these images fight against the dulling nature of the print. This reality of the disposable medium – its evocation of a falsely stagnant reality – must be confronted when recording a contemporary, existing community.
Ultimately, the practical benefits of using disposable cameras outweighed the material cons, and the developed photographs reflect the analog spirit we engaged: when forced to make deliberate choices, Marian self-curated a collection of images of trash and graffiti; when moving slowly, Philmore took two pictures of almost every subject; when going for a walk, Fatima documented a sequence of buildings along Blue Hill Ave. Leroy pictured the past, while Jonathan and Maxime found moments of lively beauty in the now.
The cameras still in the world, not yet returned, point tantalizingly to an expansive, infinite Mattapan. The space between what we know and what we don’t has metaphorically materialized in the yet-returned cameras: we know that it’s there, but we also know it’s beyond our reach. With the concrete one hundred and thirty pictures we developed and have in hand, each time we looked at them new aspects emerged, mirroring the sense that an yarrangement will be inadequate. Even when authored by multiple residents, the portrait of Mattapan is still, and will always be, incomplete. We worked to address the infinite through combinatory curation, with multiple images printed repeatedly in new juxtapositions, pointing to the variety of meanings within any single work.
What follows are, in order: our selection of images across authors, our arrangement of images by author, indexed portfolios of each author’s photographs in the order they were made, and an encyclopedic collection of everyone’s images arranged by happenstance. Some images are slipped between the pages as chance encounters, to be moved about as you see fit. Or, to be added to, over time, as more cameras are returned and photographs are developed. In this way, the printed book becomes a carnet or scrapbook of sorts, an expanding album. We hope the variation in curatorial compositions engenders connections between concrete subjects, themes, and forms while pointing to what projects beyond the frame.