Family Photo-Share Day
Saturday, October 14, 2023 | 9:00am-2:00pm
This event is free.
- Record the stories behind your family photographs
- Pose for your portrait
- Digitize your old family photos
- Learn more about photo preservation
- Educational opportunities for children
- Connect with fellow community members
RSVP by clicking here to reserve your spot for portraits and video sessions.
The Family Pictures Syracuse project will launch with a screening of Thomas Allen Harris’s award-winning documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), which explores the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. Bringing to light the hidden and unknown photos shot by both professional and vernacular African American photographers, the film opens a window into the lives of black families, whose experiences and perspectives are often missing from the traditional historical canon. Inspired by the book Reflections in Black by photo historian Deborah Willis, the film features the works of esteemed photographic artists Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Anthony Barboza, Hank Willis Thomas, Coco Fusco, Clarissa Sligh, James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and many others.
Following the screening, director Thomas Allen Harris will join the organizers of Family Pictures Syracuse in a discussion of the film and the project it inspired.
About the Family Pictures Syracuse project
Family Pictures Syracuse is a collaboration between Syracuse’s Turning the Lens Collective and The Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling to assemble an archive for social justice in the city of Syracuse. The Turning the Lens Collective recognizes that the photographs we take, display in our homes, or keep in family albums are sites for public memory—windows into stories that too often go unseen and underwritten. With our Family Pictures Syracuse project, we seek to inspire our city to narrate the stories our images hold to ensure that our histories are not lost or overlooked. We believe that working toward a living community photo archive will benefit our city’s residents as its very existence will assert that everyone, especially our most vulnerable members, have always and will continue to have a stake in Syracuse’s shared local history, our present, and our future.
