Take a walk through Times Square and one thing becomes immediately obvious – tourists love to take pictures of New York City – our New York City.
Native New Yorkers, on the other hand, don’t always stop to appreciate how the afternoon sunlight penetrates through elevated train tracks or how raindrops can make street lamps glisten blocks away.
In the middle, however, you’ll find the New Yorkers who are not quite tourists, but by no means natives either. This breed – the newly arrived immigrant – looks at the city through a completely different lens, literally, thanks to a photography class in Long Island City that’s helping them light their way.
Project Luz, named after the Spanish word for “light,” is a weekend class developed specifically to help adult immigrants connect to their new communities through the lens of a camera. The program makes a mysterious foreign city come to life for those unaccustomed to the concrete, brick and steel of the Big Apple.
The brainchild of photographer Sol Aramendi, Project Luz started in 2004 shortly after she arrived in New York from her homeland of Argentina. For a monthly fee, immigrants learn the basics of photography, connecting their everyday experiences with storytelling through imagery.
“As soon as I moved to New York, photography helped me to get to know the city, to interact with people,” said Aramendi, who started out as an architect and photography teacher. “I think that photography could be a tool of empowerment for a lot of immigrants.”
The bilingual English and Spanish classes, which cost $60 for two months, are taught on Saturdays and Sundays in a studio space on LIC’s Davis Street, near the artist and graffiti Mecca, 5 Pointz, and on some weekends at the Queens Museum. The program connects the technical aspects of photography with art, as students also visit museums, and hear from invited artists, thanks to a four-year partnership with the Museum of Modern Art.
The two-month course culminates in a personal project for each student, who has the choice to tell the story of another immigrant or the story of a neighborhood that is new to him or her, which Aramendi calls “safaris on the cities.” Students are encouraged to visit a neighborhood with a culture different from their own, to learn their beliefs and customs, so that they can expand their horizons.
“I always tell them, people pay thousands of dollars to come to New York, and here you only have to pay $2.50 to travel around the world,” Aramendi said.
Luz Medina travelled from Connecticut every weekend to participate in Project Luz. The Colombian learned about the classes on television and said that she became interested in learning.
“I’ve learned how to use a camera because usually people think that taking pictures is easy but it’s important to learn how to play with the light and to focus,” said Medina, who completed the Photography 1 course in December 2009 and learned to use computer graphics program Adobe Photoshop. “I’m going to continue on and take Photography 2 and learn how to use the flash because this time around we did everything manually.”
At the culmination of the student projects, Project Luz publishes a booklet with student-generated prose and images. This allows the immigrants to offer their own perspective and story.
According to Aramendi, many centers use her organization’s books to teach English through photography. Last year, Project Luz published eight issues.
“We have created a community that works on its own, and it is inspiring in many ways,” Aramendi said of her experiences with students. “Usually when they start, it’s for the technology, but in the end, they find it is so much more. Photography is secondary. It is about what is behind the photos, to see things through the lens.”
For more information contact Sol Aramendi at infoprojectluz@gmail.com or by phone at 718-729-0945.
