Recuerdos y fotografias de Avenida Guadalupe

Recuerdos y fotografias de Avenida Guadalupe

For my group project this semester, I will be working with fellow classmate Geremy Landin on helping the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center coordinate a photo exhibit project.  One of the working titles for this project is ‘Recuerdos y fotografias de Avenida Guadalupe’ translated to ‘Memories and photos from the Guadalupe Neighborhood’. As we start to sort through photos, we hope to find a recurring theme to organize the future exhibit. One working idea for a topic of this project will be the photos that we can  match up to current areas of the neighborhood.  For example, we will look through photos in an attempt to recreate photos in the same or similar areas as much as possible for family.

Creating a workflow and a photo archive 

A major challenge of this project is creating a work flow and a a finders aid for those interested in looking through the collection in the future. There are multiple ways to organize the collection and this will likely take up the majority of our project time. One of the initial ways we can sort out photos is by those that we can identify coming from a particular street or house. I see two major outputs of this particular public history project and they would be the initial definition of scope and the creation of a way for future interested parties to continue to organize and catalog future photos for a rotating exhibit. The second major output would ideally be an exhibit that could be showcased either at the Casa de Cuentos or even at partner businesses in the neighborhood if given approval by Esperanza.

Timeline and future possibilities

In the future, I could see much more added to this project including helping Esperanza with oral histories and maybe even  working together on where to showcase the photo exhibit outside of the neighborhood. Based on our group conversations, we believe that it will take a least a month for us to come up with a proper finders aid for cataloging a small portion of the Esperzanza photo collection.  That means by the middle of October we will be able to start actually picking out some pictures for an exhibit. We discussed the idea of putting some of this material online although we feel this aspect of the project may be limited to what we can create in an online blog that the Esperanza website can link to if they choose to share the online exhibit that we may be able to accomplish by the end of the semester.

Sources for project and possible policy discussions 

We believe that there is enough material that a true digitization project would be beyond the focus of the scope of this semester’s project. For our sources, we plan to reach out to the Esperanza Center and work with the volunteer who has already done a lot of the work on creating the neighborhood photo project to seek this person’s thoughts and feedback on what has been done in the past and what can be done in the future. One challenge that we will face with this project is how much Esperanza already has on their plate as a non-profit organization. Our ability to reach out to sources in the neighborhood may also be an additional challenge as we are not sure how many details are known about the photos that have been accepted as donations. We hope to suggest a potential photo donation acceptance policy that will help with future additions to the photo project. We believe that the cost to complete the project for this semester will be relatively little as most of the project will be creating a structure for future neighbors to come and look through the donated photo archive.  There may be a need for a few bankers boxes and some manilla folders. We are open to the needs of Esperzana with this project and will adjust the scope and focus of the semester project as we discuss further with the class and get feedback.