CARE:WORK PHOTO EXHIBITION FEATURED IN PHOTOVILLE 2022 FESTIVAL
Opening June 4, 2022 at Brooklyn Bridge Park
Contact:
Eric Siegel, Founder and Director, care:work eric@careworkproject.org
Deborah Schwartz, Producer, care:work deborah@dfschwartz.com
Eric Siegel, Founder and Director, care:work eric@careworkproject.org
Deborah Schwartz, Producer, care:work deborah@dfschwartz.com
NEW YORK – care:work is proud to be prominently featured in Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of the Brooklyn-based nonprofit Photoville's FENCE for the 2022 Photoville festival, opening June 4 in locations throughout New York City. Forty photographs revealing the diversity, dignity, and strength of care workers in communities throughout the United States will be displayed throughout the summer on Old Fulton Street.
care:work’s curator, Deborah Schwartz, until recently the President of the Brooklyn Historical Society, selected nine photographers through an international call, each of whom shared images inspired by their own experiences of caregiving in their families and communities. “In selecting this group of photographers, our ideas about what caregiving means expanded with each new image we reviewed. This group of images is about collective care, devotion, empathy, and compassion. We see these images as a call to action and a question we must each consider: how do we contribute to a world in which caring for others is central to our lives?”
The founder and director of care:work, Eric Siegel, has worked for 40 years in museums throughout the country. His eyes were opened to the pervasiveness of caregiving through personal experiences. “After a lifetime of interaction, I realized that society has a blind spot when it comes to the essential role caregivers, women of color, and immigrants, play in our society.” care:work is devoted to exploring and foregrounding the dignity, diversity, and importance of caregivers in our families, institutions, and communities.
The founder and director of care:work, Eric Siegel, has worked for 40 years in museums throughout the country. His eyes were opened to the pervasiveness of caregiving through personal experiences. “After a lifetime of interaction, I realized that society has a blind spot when it comes to the essential role caregivers, women of color, and immigrants, play in our society.” care:work is devoted to exploring and foregrounding the dignity, diversity, and importance of caregivers in our families, institutions, and communities.
Artists include photographers Anna and Jordan Rathkopf, who explored their Brooklyn community’s volunteer caregivers in the earliest days of the pandemic. When Anna was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, Jordan was put into the role of caregiver. “Our personal health crisis opened our eyes to the critical and under-appreciated work of people who serve as caregivers for the neighbors and communities.”
Cinthya Santos-Briones’ work documents how “indigenous migrants organized themselves through neighborhoods…to respond to the migration and health crises and to celebrate their carnivals, or patron saint festivities.”
Photographer Accra Shepp lived near Elmhurst Hospital, an epicenter of the Covid devastation in NYC. “As I followed the virus it began to change, just as it does in the body, so it did within the community. The lockdown led to mass unemployment, which created devastating hunger. Food pantries sprung up, organized by ordinary individuals, aided by restaurants who had ample supplies of food, but no one to eat it.”
Elegant and beautiful portraits by Raymond W. Holman, whose father “Big Ray” died from Alzheimers disease express the goal of care:work perfectly: “This project is dedicated to all of the family caregivers in the Universe who understand the meaning of the word LOVE.”
This exhibition was inspired by the leadership and vision of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
