Fuck Yeah The Bronx!
Click on all photos for source
I am from the South Bronx, and I love it.
photo by: Bashira Webb
A member of the Chingalings Motorcycle Club pushes another biker at the entrance to their rent-free city-owned clubhouse in the South Bronx.
(via)
President Jimmy Carter views the devastation of the South Bronx with New York mayor Abe Beame (right) and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Harris, October 1977.
THE PROVENANCE OF BEAUTY is a poetic travelogue performed on a bus touring the South Bronx. As we travel the streets of this neighborhood, Rankine’s evocative text points out and reflects upon the sites that pass by outside the windows. Views that to an outsider might go by unnoticed – a factory dressed up as townhouses, the theater where La Lupe held court that is now a church – complicated places that ask what creates a neighborhood in a city in a country in this world.
Ricky Flores:
The majority of the photos currently on the site where taken during the 1980’s. They are primarily focused on Puerto Ricans in New York and specifically in the South Bronx. More photos will be posted in the next year or so that will cover my career as a photojournalist in New York doing beat coverage on issues of racism and police brutality and civil unrest. Work will also include stuff from Central and South America.
A note about the South Bronx work. Most of those photos were taken when I was first introduced to photography. They are as much personal photos as well as social documentary photos of what it was like to live in the South Bronx at that time. Except for those of us who lived through it, most people have no conception of what it was like to experience and attempt to survive the systematic destruction of an entire community. I was one of those who lived through it. By simply living there, with no conscious thought at first of what I was doing, I began to photograph life in my community. Then, as time passed, I came to a growing realization and horror of what was being visited on us by a city, state and federal government that had turned their backs on us and did nothing as whole blocks disappeared. I hope that through my photos people can catch a glimpse of the vibrant community that had to live through that and also the terrible waste of lives that were lost as a result of living in those conditions. In many of the photos are friends and family members of mine, some who have lost their lives to drug abuse, senseless murders and the growing epidemic of AIDS directly related to drug use. Many of them in any other situation could have become great athletes, members of law enforcement, educators, business women and men, artists, poets, painters and anything else you can imagine. In fact many others have, having a profound impact on the culture of this nation through, music, dance, politics and arts. But in the process those of us with the greatest natural abilities never had the chance to seek a better life. The few people and organizations that made attempts to save those lives did so with great love and compassion and a fierceness that was rivaled by no one outside of the Bronx. But even they couldn’t reach everyone. This work is for all those who lived and died during that time of upheaval and for generations to come to remember the people of the South Bronx.
(via his Flickr where you can see more of his photos)
