Raising East New York
Raising East New York is a series of portraits (of fathers of color in East New York) that explores the question: How does one’s environment affect fatherhood?
Photographer Phyllis B. Dooney installs real-time camera obscuras, creating an effect where the outside world is literally projected onto the walls of the subject’s home, and captures a portrait. The experience is further crystallized in the voices of the subjects; audio recordings that explore love, fatherhood, childhood, and the associated challenges in a neighborhood like East New York.
This generation of fathers in East New York (a growing concentration of people of color, living in a high concentration of poverty) is rife with the long-term societal and psychological effects of systemic marginalization like mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, the 1980’s crack epidemic, economic insecurity, and frequent exposure to crime. The impact of those problems shows up in day-to-day home life and in the extreme statistics on family formations in East New York: fewer than 10% of children live with both biological parents, for example.
Raising East New York helps fill the vacuum around these statistics by exploring (on a personal level) how day-to-day life, grappling with the monumental societal challenges in East New York, affects these fathers and the endeavor of (co)parenting. By doing this, the work also exposes how the “deadbeat Dad” label, often stapled to the American inner-city Black man, is a gross and counter-productive simplification.
More stories by Phyllis B. Dooney
