Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In a worn-down neighbourhood of a worn-down borough of a grand old city, sits a grand, old, worn-down building. That building, on the corner of Courtlandt Avenue and 151st Street in the South Bronx, has served many people. It was built in 1871 as a German saloon, with butchers and tailors renting rooms upstairs. In the ’40s, it was an Italian sandwich shop. Then a luncheonette, then a candy store. Through the ’70s, as vast expanses of the South Bronx burnt, it survived. For decades it just housed pigeons, until the ’90s, when neighbours say each floor sheltered a different vice: drugs on the first, guns on the second, a brothel on the third. Today it serves mostly middle- and high-school kids. It teaches them how to be photographers, and how to be journalists.Open a door on any floor of the Bronx Documentary Center, and you enter a flurry of creativity. In the basement, kids cut negatives and study them over a lightbox, flirting in the darkroom between enlargers and chemicals. In the library, they flip through books of photography greats, from Diane Arbus to Weegee (“Not only did this bad thing happen, but someone stood and took a picture!” one student cries). In a classroom, a teen sneaks Popchips to a dog under the table, while the group workshops a student’s email requesting police brutality data for the Bronx. All over, they chat about the nearly impossible question of what makes a good story. In the corner sits a journalist, me, taking notes and asking herself the same thing.The BDC is a school first and foremost. Students amble in once or twice a week after school or work to take semester-long classes in photo and video journalism. They learn everything from composition and darkroom printing to social documentary theory and how to talk to strangers. For kids, teens, fellows and senior citizens, every class is free. Every high-school senior who attended classes at the BDC has been accepted to college, about 65 students in total, the majority attending on scholarships, as the first in their families to go. Its alumni have gone on to study fine arts, film and media at American universities and work as filmmakers and journalists. But it’s also a community centre, one which runs weekend workshops, film festivals and community garden events, and galleries that show professional work.The staff do all of this in an area of the Bronx that is remorselessly overlooked. We’re in the poorest congressional district in the nation. In 2022, 30 per cent of residents lived below the federal poverty line. Last time the city counted, more than one-third of Bronx schools didn’t have a single full-time art teacher. And unlike the rest of New York, this part of the Bronx has barely improved. News outlets rarely write stories about it. Potential donors to the BDC are reluctant to visit it.“What Mike and the institution have done is allow local photographers to have their own voices,” Fred Ritchin, the dean emeritus for the International Center of Photography, tells me, speaking of BDC founder and director Michael Kamber. He calls it an inversion: instead of an outsider dropping in to tell the world about a community, the community educates the world about themselves. “It’s exactly what social documentary work should be about. For a very small institution, they’re punching way above their weight. It’d be nice if there were six of them.”Earlier this year, on the 10th anniversary of its youth programme, I spent four months shadowing classes at the BDC to make sense of its impact. I came each day with questions: first, what can a place like this do for people’s lives, and for a city? And second, how does it survive? Its business model is precarious, mostly made up of frantic grant writing. The buildings may be grand, but they’re also old, and cold. In winter, cling film lines the windows. What would it need to actually thrive? “There’s talent everywhere,” Kamber tells me, over and over again. “The talent is here. What people need is structure.” He says if they can provide that for the students, they can do some serious good. “We don’t have the budget for thousands of kids. We can’t change America. But we can change a handful of kids in the South Bronx.”When I first arrive at the BDC on a Monday at the start of the year, Kamber runs down the stairs to greet me. He’s 60, and fits my image of Retired War Photographer: serious, talks softly, rarely laughs. He looks wary, but over time I learn that’s just how he looks. He’s wearing work pants and hiking boots covered in paint and dust. I estimate he could land on a desert island and build a house in a week. I’m here to shadow a class, and at 4pm the students amble in for the first day of their second semester. They’re in HS2 (“High School 2”), an advanced photography class in film and darkroom development. Next they can take video documentary. Ricardo Partida, the BDC’s youth education manager, collects the kids’ phones in a bag, then asks what they think of his new shoes. “Fire,” one says. Then teacher Carlos de la Sancha tells them that this semester is serious; they’ll be working on one project for the whole term, and “we’re going to push you guys a little harder. We’re expecting a lot from you because we know you can do it.”Next they introduce me. I tell them I’m writing about the BDC. Kamber asks how many journalists work for the Financial Times around the world. I say about 700. He asks how they commission photographers. I tell them. He asks how much they pay. I ballpark. Then he turns to the students. “See,” he tells them, “they pay a lot of money to be a photographer. This is just one career path, but if you’re interested, you can talk to Lilah.” I realise it will be impossible to not become part of this story.The students go around the circle, suggesting topics for their semester projects. Arwen wants to focus on “old people”. Hazel’s curious about our relationships with pets. Cara-Star’s interested in how people make their own communities. The teachers brainstorm how each could work. De la Sancha gives them a rubric: how would you photograph that? Who are your subjects? Where would you find them?We cross the street to one of their galleries, to see an exhibition of professional work. It includes photography by all three teachers. De la Sancha presents a photo of his grandparents’ kitchen in Oaxaca. He explains why he made the kitchen dark and underexposed: to show how it feels to look in from outside in the midday sun. Students ask darkroom technique questions: which parts did he “dodge” and “burn”?I ask the class why they like shooting film. “When you’re doing it all yourself, you’re really making the art,” says Hazel.“Being in the darkroom is so relaxing,” says Arwen.“When I develop film photography, I can truly say every decision was mine,” says Ahmed.“Total ownership,” Kamber agrees. Over time, students give me other reasons: film photography is one of the few things in their life that isn’t instantaneous, and that’s nice. They love reporting on the Bronx, because everyone says it’s dangerous but actually it’s beautiful and full of life. To understand how a place like the BDC can exist, it’s helpful to know how it grew. Kamber bought this grand old landmarked building for about $700,000 in 2010. He lives in the Bronx, nearby. In those first days, he sat at the window with his friend, the late British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, and dreamed of the gallery and educational space it could become. They had met during the civil war in Liberia, where Hetherington informally taught Liberian kids photography. Kamber had done the same in Iraq and the Ivory Coast. He’d told Hetherington, “This could work in the South Bronx. I want to do this at home.”In 2011, Hetherington was killed on assignment in Libya. Kamber remembers a call from a mutual friend who said, “You know what you’ve got to do. You have to start that place. Don’t worry about the money. We’ll get people together. Just start.”So Kamber and some volunteers established the gallery to present their debut show: photos from Hetherington’s last rolls of 220mm film, many shot the day he died, the rolls stained with his blood. What came next was a scramble. Kamber’s team couldn’t afford to teach classes at first, so they showed exhibits, took family portraits for the neighbourhood on holidays like Thanksgiving and opened a photography library upstairs with Hetherington’s donated collection of photo books (it’s still the only photo library in the Bronx). They applied for grants, and Kamber kept travelling to Iraq and Afghanistan on assignment to pay the bills, until they could launch a middle-school digital photo class.In 2014, they opened a darkroom and started teaching film photography, using donated old cameras and enlargers. When they realised students weren’t going on to college, Kamber hired a college counsellor. When parents wanted to learn, they launched adult classes in Spanish. They added video, and senior citizens. Kamber says they grow based on what the community makes clear it wants and needs.In 2022, the high-school classes started a newspaper. They were doing some reporting anyway, for class, and wanted to publish it. The teachers encouraged students to walk around their neighbourhoods, look carefully and ask questions. They noticed what seemed like increased drug addiction on the block around their closest subway stop. The students interviewed the addicts and, to corroborate what they heard, requested data from the city. They found that six times more people died of overdoses in 2021 than in 1999 in New York, with the highest death rates in the Bronx, and that one of the state’s reported solutions was to offer the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone in local pharmacies for free. A student visited the nearest participating pharmacy, and learnt Naloxone hadn’t been delivered in more than five months. After the piece came out in the BDC’s newspaper, two groups of clinicians and researchers from nearby Montefiore hospital surveyed the area, suggesting that high-school journalism is making an impact on professional community drug treatment.For another newspaper issue, students took a tape measure and calculated the distance of new marijuana smoke shops from local schools. Many were closer than the legal minimum, 500 feet. They entered in their school uniforms, and were offered drugs. They confronted the local police commander. The story got picked up by outlets such as ABC’s New York news. Within weeks, one shop had been raided and closed.“They find stories like that all the time just by talking to people,” says Kamber. “Journalists from Manhattan aren’t coming up here to find these stories. They’re not on the street the way these kids are.”He broaches the touchiest big-city topic of all: “Take gentrification,” he says. “A lot of our students have 25-year-old teachers at school, who just graduated from [elite liberal arts colleges like] Wesleyan and Oberlin, who are telling them this neighbourhood is being gentrified. But actually, I tell them to think critically. Don’t just accept what I told you, or the mayor, or your teachers. Go out and look around. What are your eyes telling you? Are white rich people flooding into this neighbourhood? No. Actually, it’s poor Venezuelan people. And now can you measure that against some type of evidence you’ve collected?” He sighs. “We point them in the right direction. But I’m not going to tell them. That’s critical thinking to me.”A month after my first class with HS2, the students are deep in their projects. Brandon shows us photos he’s taken of his dad, in a project called “My Pops”. He tells us that his dad went to prison in Mexico, and in the years since has become a religious family man. We look at Brandon’s photos, most shot at home on New Year’s Eve: his father through the bathroom doorway, buzzing his brother’s hair. Cooking with his kids in the kitchen. Dancing with his daughter in the living room. “What do you see?” de la Sancha asks. “It feels natural,” Maya says. “It’s intimate but it’s not forced. Because they’re used to having Brandon around.”Arwen’s been asking old people if she can photograph them, but gets rejected a lot, because “old people do not like getting their photos taken”. De la Sancha suggests she rephrase “old people”.Bernie’s doing a project on his own father, who’s a street vendor. He sells tortas, tacos and tamales from a cart to construction workers in Manhattan, feeding them for about $7 in neighbourhoods where lunch can cost $20 or more. “I take the train with my dad every day,” Bernie says. “He gets off at 59th Street. Our days depart when I go to school. But maybe during the break I can go with him instead.”Maya and her dad spent the weekend visiting small local businesses. She went to nine, and shot four rolls of film. The owners even let her go into their kitchens. This is a real success story, and the class reacts with a collective, “Wow.” “Yeah,” she agrees, “I was surprised too!”Learning to approach strangers, many students tell me, has made them braver. “I was scared when I first joined,” says Pamela Rozon, a BDC alum and freelance journalist who now works at the centre as a programme assistant. “I was a shy kid, very anxious. This place is almost like tough love, it pushes you out there, like, ‘Speak to people!’”I may be stating the obvious, but journalism isn’t what it used to be. For photojournalism, it’s even worse. Last year the US news sector cut 2,681 jobs, nearly double those lost in the previous two combined. Ad revenue has been slashed to one-fifth of what it was when I was their age in 2006. Local journalism is withering, with one study estimating that 2.5 city and regional papers close in the US each week. These students are learning a dying form — shooting film, developing in a darkroom — in an age when they all have cameras in their pockets. Obvious again, but arts funding in America is abysmal too. This year the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, which largely allocates US federal arts funding, is $211mn (£164mn). Compare that to the Arts Council of England, which allocated £445mn this year. Experts in non-profits and the arts in both countries believe cultural budgets are far too low, but the US allocates less than half the money, for about six times the people.For small or midsize arts institutions, that means directors spend most of their energy, talent and time on fundraising. They essentially beg for money, from local government agencies, foundations, wealthy individual donors and corporations just to get by. The BDC mostly relies on foundation and government grants, including from the Ford, Pinkerton and Leonian Foundations. When we speak in March, Kamber feels OK about this. He tells me, “You can survive on grants if you’re smart about it and have a good grant writer. But you can’t really grow to the next level.”But nothing is a given, and when I call Kamber in May, he’s stressed. His biggest grant, from Creatives Rebuild New York, is running out in June and they’re losing 35 per cent of their funding.“What are you going to do?” I ask. “Lay people off,” he says. “Close down programmes.” He says he might have to close the senior-citizen programmes. I ask how much that programme costs him. He says they can do a year-long programme of four large senior classes on a $20,000 budget.By midsummer, they’ve had to cut most of their adult education. Kamber says they’re desperately casting about for new funders, but he doesn’t feel hopeless. “I tell students all the time, no one promised me a rose garden,” he says. “We’re in a tough spot but we’ll go out and rebuild. It’s just what we’ve got to do.”Towards the end of my reporting, Kamber and I sit in the staff lounge, a cat wandering between us. I run everything I’ve learnt by him, and everything I still want to understand. Like, what does it take to make more BDCs? There’s a photography centre in Detroit based on the BDC, and others in Bogotá, Lisbon and Accra. Ritchin had told me that the BDC reminds him of the early days of the International Center of Photography, which now teaches 3,500 students a year.Kamber says it’s scrappiness (“I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but we’ve always just done shit”), being present in the community and funding. For years, they’ve been told that the real money is with individual donations, but it’s been hard for them to find wealthy donors willing to give. Why? He has some theories, including that some benefactors love the Bronx but remember the old Italian Bronx, from the ’50s, “and they look at our kids and . . . ” he pauses.“I don’t think they’re consciously discriminating against us,” he says, but it’s hard to get them to visit. “But I can’t blame other people,” he continues. “I think a lot of it is about relationships. You go to dinner with these people, you go to openings, socialise with them, create long-term relationships. And I’m here fixing the plumbing and dealing with student emergencies.”“So you can’t afford to spend your time schmoozing?” I ask. “I really can’t,” he says, then sighs. “I probably should. It’s just not who I am.”When I return to HS2 for my final visit, the kids are almost done with their projects. I look at their photos: Bernie’s dad, pushing his cart up a hill. Maya’s local salon owner, eyeing the camera as she paints a customer’s nails. Soon these photos will be framed in an exhibition downstairs, where the students will present them to their families.We take a field trip to the International Center of Photography, on the Lower East Side. I watch the kids walk towards different photographs, and study them for a long time.Arwen stands in front of a photo of a crowded classroom of children, taken by the 19th-century Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis, around 1890. “Jacob Riis is one of my favourite photojournalists,” she says, smiling big. “He photographed the conditions of New York. He tried sending them to a newspaper but they rejected him, so he got all the rich people, showed them the photos, and it opened their eyes to what was going on. And they were able to bring in a bunch of money, and it improved downtown New York.” Partida applauds. “Nice, Arwen!” he says. “You ate on that.”Brandon tells me he’s deciding between becoming a mechanic or going to college for journalism. He says trying to make a decision is driving him crazy, but that, really, his dream is to be a staff photographer at The New York Times. We walk to Shake Shack, and I ask the kids what’s cool these days, they say bows, and Maya pulls some ribbon from her backpack in case I want a bow for my hair. Bernie tells me about that day he spent with his dad, photographing him as he sold tortas, and says it brought them closer. He says he’s deciding whether to study journalism (his passion) or software engineering (for job security), and hopes there’s a way he can combine both.I listen, torn. My field is flailing. But being with these kids reminds me of everything it’s taught me, that I forgot isn’t inherent. Who am I to discourage them? I tell Bernie to yes, combine both! And tell me if I can help. Then I go home, and wrestle, for the thousandth time, with what makes a good story, and how to distil countless hours of human moments into one. Lilah Raptopoulos is the host of ‘Life and Art’, the flagship culture podcast from FT Weekend, and a US culture writer for the Financial TimesFollow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
