Julie's Blog

Gentrification is an interesting topic to me. Since I have started college, I moved to a room in Bushwick, Brooklyn with a friend of my cousin’s. It’s weird to be living in an area that is so heavily gentrified because I don’t really associate entirely with either the population that is gentrifying the area- young urban professionals; or the population that is being taken over by gentrification- a mostly lower income Latinx population. I grew up in a suburb of New York City where the popular culture was mostly delayed New York City culture so I don’t feel like an outsider to youth New York culture. At the same time, I feel a similarity with the way that I dress and interests I have with these “gentrifiers.” It’s a strange line to straddle, because most people are older than me and have pretty different life situations than I do. However, attending school here at CUNY has made me feel more like a “native” New Yorker, because those are the kinds of people I spend time with every day.

New York, I love you (click here to listen to the playlist on Spotify)

For my city stories assignment I compiled a playlist of songs that are about New York City. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City so the city was always glorified for me. It was somewhere fun and exciting I got to go to on the weekends, to go to museums or events. Once I was in high school, my friends and I started being able to go to the city on our own. All of the songs in my playlist have special, beautiful, poignant memories associated with them for me. I was inspired to make a playlist because my friends and I used to make playlists for each other often in high school. We would often burn them to CDs so we could play them in the car.

BKNY by Fat Tony reminds me of a very specific day when my best friend Anna and I drove out to Midwood, Brooklyn to work on a carnival we were preparing for Purim (a Jewish holiday where you get to drink alcohol and dress up!) and then we hung out for one of the first times with a friend of mine who I’m now really good friends with of who lives in Park Slope. It was a great day and it felt exciting and magical to be in Brooklyn. Anna’s dad had let her borrow the car and we were driving through Gowanus to go back home and listening to BKNY with the windows wide open. The song talks about doing different things in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It’s so cool when you can hear a song and be in the same place that the artists is singing about. Very cheesy, but very peak high school moment.

NEW DORP. NEW YORK by SBTRKT is a really fun song featuring Ezra Koenig who is the lead singer of a band I used to really like. I just casually knew it and I was at a music festival where the band was playing but I didn’t really know their music so I didn’t go to their set. But then all of a sudden the one song I knew started playing and Erza Koenig was on stage performing with them. My friends and I couldn’t believe it, we started dancing and singing along and it was so nice actually to not be squished up in the front and just be able to wiggle around. The song mentions New Dorp, a place in Staten Island where I have never been, but I really like maps and I recognized the name from looking at a map and thinking it was a funny toponym.

Summer in the City reminds me of being young, specifically the summer after Freshman year and going into the city with my friends and walking around and hanging out in Central Park. I feel like I glorified moments like these more than they actually happened and I remember listening to this song all of the time and getting goosebumps. One of my favorite lyrics is: “and I went to a protest just to rub up against strangers.” I always thought Regina Spektor was a great lyricist and I used to want to get one of her lyrics tattooed. Silly me.

Brooklyn by Theo Katzman is another song that reminds me of being in like Freshman or Sophomore year. I used to work for a birthday party service for kids and sometimes we would do parties in city which was really fun. I remember one party we did was the day of a show I was going to near Saint Marks Place. It was really cool because it was the first small basement type show I had ever been to. And I got to see this very special song live!

It was so much fun creating this playlist. I love create a physical song lists because you can make them cute with little doodles. I haven’t made one in a while but this one was like a love letter to New York City and inspired me to start making these again.

For my portfolio I decided that instead of photos, I would take a second long video of a moment from each day, every day. I chose to approach the project from this angle because I’ve been really into movies lately and wanted to explore the medium of film for myself. I also had listened to an episode of TED Radio Hour, a podcast I like where they talked about memory and how we perceive time in our lives. In the episode they interviewed a guy who had created this app to record a one second video everyday. He created it because he was thinking back on the last 5 years of his life and could remember the big moments and specifically fun times but couldn’t remember what his life had been like on a day to day basis. This got me thinking about how I thought about and remembered the past few years of my life, years where a lot of things changed from year to year and even from month to month. Coming home from the city some weekends, I walk through my house and catch whiffs of certain smells that bring tears to my eyes. It doesn’t feel the same anymore, I strain to remember what my life was like here, how I spent my days and time when I wasn’t at school. I have a hard time recalling anything minute. So since I’ve downloaded this app in the beginning of the year I’ve been trying to record a second everyday. Sometimes I forget but I don’t beat myself up for it, I have a good amount of footage now. I spent a few months this year travelling around Europe and the Middle East and it’s really cool having small moments recorded from then. A year ago I was living in Prague, Czech Republic on my own. It was really hard at first to learn how to fill my days with things that made me happy, but I really learned how to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things I enjoyed. The whole time I was there feels kind of like a blur at this point and I wish I had had this technique to remember what I had done most days. I think this says a lot to me regarding the power of capturing moments in photography. When I show people my full video of all my one second moments from the last year I think that Roland Barthes’ element of studium grabs their attention, they notice the bursts of live music, the sound of rain, or the images from a particularly interesting scene. For me, watching these videos is so much more, the punctum really reaches out to me. I can feel like I’m back in the reality of when the video was taken, if only for a second. When others see my videos, I’m not sure if they’re just appreciating them for their aesthetic value, or if they’re really appreciating them as small proofs of my existence. Then I think, am I just capturing these moments to create something that looks nice, simply capitalizing my existence, or is this really an exercise in logging my experience so that I don’t forget? What would be so bad about forgetting?

In my actual clips, I chose subjects that stood out for me, things that brightened my day and made me think. Like when the train passing your train is on a different track and starts going uphill and you can see the people whose lives were parallel to your own depart from you at once. A lot of shots on me riding my bike around the city because it makes me feel free and the most happy. Two dads pushing their kids and playing around, bumping their strollers into each other. Lots of clips of events that I’ve gone to where I’ve met some nice people and learned some new things. A few days that I went up to Massachusetts, which even though it isn’t in New York City I decided to include because I felt that it represented an important contrast and shift in my mind, seeing the way my best friends are experiencing their new lives in college. I don’t know if I was really trying to convey anything in particular with my photos, just trying to document my life and what made me stop and think. Although, probably subconsciously I was thinking about what scenes would look interesting or cool. When I think back, there are actually a good number of moments that would look really cool but I forgot to take videos of. I’m glad however that the urge to capture a moment didn’t interrupt my actual living of it. Individually these clips work as a kind of moving photograph for me, but altogether they make up a month of my life, and I’m glad to have recorded it.

all of my clips from the past 2 months in NYC: IMG_5918.MOV

all of my clips from my last year (if you’re interested): IMG_5924.MOV

Welcome to my exhibit! Here I am compiling different photographs and pieces of art that focus on different aspects of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Included are perspectives not just from Palestinians and Israelis, but also the response from other parts of the world. As you walk through the rooms, you will feel the open, accepting welcome that Israel extends to all Jews.

The first room is painted white and you will hear traditional Mizrahi music playing, but this is all a part of the New Jew identity, you are not quite Middle Eastern but your culture still borrows recipes and flaunts music from the societies that many Jews shared with their Arab brothers and sisters. You will view photographs from the early days of Israel, when people first began to fulfil their Zionist identities, living on kibbutzim (self-sustaining communities) and marching in independence parades. The next room, painted grey, you will see protest signs from outside nations. These signs say that you should boycott Israeli products, they have been produced on occupied land. You feel conflicted, you might not have realized that Israel was something that people opposed so staunchly. Then you see a photograph from an Israel Parade in America. These American Jews are proud to be Zionist and feel connected to Israel. They think that the rest of the Middle East is committing crimes against the Jewish people in their newly developed homeland. You walk to the final room, it’s very dark in here. You can hardly remember that it was a sunny day outside. There are photos of Palestinians, they look hurt and concerned. You see a side that you hadn’t seen before. When you walk out of the dark room, you are confronted by an infographic that shows the true makeup of the land of Palestine/Israel. You never realized that so much of what you thought was the “West Bank” is actually occupied by radical Israeli settlers.

Self-Analysis

The overarching goal for my exhibit was to show photos from multiple perspectives of the occupation in Palestine. I wanted to show how Israelis saw the situation, how Palestinians saw the situation (as well as what they are going through under the Israeli regime), and additionally how the outside world sees the situation. I picked mostly photographs because I felt like they best conveyed the kinds of injustices that Palestinians are going through as their land is being occupied. Of course I could have picked more interpretive pieces that expressed the situation of the Palestinians, but I felt like photos remained the most true and were the best thing to elicit feelings from my audience. I would want to display my exhibit in America because I think that many Americans do not get to see the full story of what is happening in Palestine/Israel because our news sources often only show the Israeli side of the situation.

I decided to have traditional Mizrahi (Jews from Middle Eastern countries) music playing in the background of my exhibit because I feel like it’s important to remind people (especially American Jews, who are mostly Ashkenazi (Jews from European countries)) that many Jews came from the same countries and lived in peace with the people they now see as their enemies. I arranged the pieces in different rooms, segmented from each other to be symbolic of how segmented the area of Palestine/Israel is. Palestinians are not allowed to travel outside of the West Bank without special permission, this makes it very hard for them to travel internationally because the only airport in the area is near Tel Aviv. I chose images that focused on the types of protest that are being done both against the Palestinians and against the Israelis to show just how radically different each side sees the situation. I also included historical images that I think would convey a sense of pride or nationalism from both sides. I think this would force the audience to try to make sense of how both sides feel such an inherent right to the land and are mostly unwilling to accept the validity of the other side’s view.