social documentary – Art Spiel

April 8, 2024April 8, 2024, by Art Spiel

The Burden Archives

Featured Project

Western Addition sign, photo Sheila Stover/Erni Burden circa 1960

A 1949 US Federal law set the stage for crisis-level upheaval. Cities across the country used the money it provided to launch “urban renewal” projects that often only added misery to the communities they professed to be helping. In San Francisco, a largely Black neighborhood in Western Addition was targeted on the premise that the vibrant ‘Harlem of the West’ was blighted. This misconception has gone unchallenged until now, thanks to the photographic documentation Ernest Burden III exposed in his late father’s immense photograph archive.

November 7, 2023November 6, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Reef Avni – This Was My Home

Photo Story

For 18-year-old photographer Reef Avni, photography became a way to speak at 14 when words were hard to find, a tool against his social anxiety. His father, Hagi, was not only a strong supporter but also a frequent face in his photos, becoming an integral part of the narrative Reef was creating with his camera. The other constant in Avni’s work is documenting daily life in his Kibbutz. As a fourth-generation member of Kibbutz Be’eri, his roots were as embedded in the kibbutz as the farmlands and community his great-grandfather founded in the arid Negev in the south of Israel on the night of October 6, 1946. His grandfather was among its first newborns.

April 27, 2018November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Meryl Meisler – LES YES!

Meryl Meisler 1978 / courtesy of The Storefront Project & Steven Kasher Gallery

In 2008, The National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the LES on their list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places. “LES YES!” at The Storefront Project upcoming exhibition features Meryl Meisler’s photographs of the Lower East Side during the 1970’s & 1980s. Meisler, who was born in the Bronx and raised in Long Island, captured in her photos a tight knit immigrant and working-class neighborhood during difficult times in NYC history. Continue reading “Meryl Meisler – LES YES!”