Northern-Southern Shows Eastside Community in a Century of People
Where is here? It’s everywhere.
By Wayne Alan Brenner, 11:10AM, Fri. Jul. 17, 2020
Who are all those people in the middle of your Austin Chronicle this week? Whence these monochrome portraits of citizen after citizen after citizen, arranged in a tight grid covering both inky pages of the print edition’s centerspread?
They’re people who live in, work in, grew up in, or frequent East Austin. They’re part of a longtime community – represented in the photographs by one person of every age, newborn to 100 years old.
This is “Where Is Here,” a project organized in 2019 by Keyheira Keys and Phillip Niemeyer of Austin’s Northern-Southern Gallery, an ambitious project that came to fruition after many months of planning and effort. This is what makes a neighborhood: The individuals who live in it and the connections among them.
The portraits are the work of six photographers: Arius Holifield, Montinique Monroe, Tyeschea West, Bertie Pearson, Hector Hernandez, and Ryan Junell.
The people are, like all of us, the work of time and survival, talent and tenacity, spirit and grace. They’re sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers. They’re our neighbors in this struggling city, our fellow humans staking an existence as best we can on a big rock spinning along for eons on the lonely outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy, and we’re all in this together.
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March 22, 2024
