Capturing Communities in Words and Images:

Feit Seminar

Capturing Communities in Words and Images: From Hassids to Hip Hop, from Bedouins to the Brooklyn Boardwalk

The class will explore the ways that writers and photographers have imagined, encountered, and documented diverse communities. We will look at traditionally defined communities such as the Dominicans in Washington Heights, African Americans in Harlem, Orthodox Jews in Borough Park, and Southeast Asians in Flushing as well as non-traditional communities drawn together by shared passions, predilections, and predicaments-rappers, graffiti artists, gypsies, bikers, and runaways. We will examine the work of photographers including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Joseph Koudelka and writers including James Agee, Adrian Nicole Le Blanc, William Faulkner and Sandra Cisneros. Seminar participants will produce their own Capturing Communities project.