On Monday, our team went from having no real direction or idea for our project to having a solid plan figured out. It felt great to achieve the two main goals we set out to accomplish: choosing a specific research question to address and determining the format of our project. At the start of our session on Monday, we knew that we wanted to do a photography-related project but didn’t know exactly what style or approach to take. We put that question aside for a bit and started to dig deeper into what research question we wanted to explore. Fazra was interested in thinking about how residents’ experiences of religion differ inside and outside of Regent Park. This has the potential to illuminate unique elements of the Regent Park community that shape residents’ experiences of faith. While we were excited about this research question, we still weren’t sure what kind of media project would be best suited to explore it.
Aditi really helped us bring out project ideas together. She suggested we look at The New York Times’ One in 8 Million project. This series features dozens of short videos each profiling a unique New Yorker. Rather than video footage, however, each feature shows ten black-and-white photographs of the subject as the subject narrates their own lived experience. We thought this was an amazing format that could combine Fazra and Amina’s passion for photography and our group’s interest in the experiences of specific Regent Park residents. Rather than one in eight million, our video series will document the lives of some of the ten thousand residents of Regent Park.
Daria watching a New York Times One in 8 Million feature. (Photo by Fazra)
Our plan for our project is to interview and photograph 6 to 10 members of the Regent Park community, including religious leaders, community organizers, and young people. We will take five pictures of them in the community and ask them to take five pictures outside of the community, which will be used to highlight the unique aspects of the Regent Park community through juxtaposition. We will then create a series of videos combining our interviews and photographs to explore how residents’ experiences of religion differ within and outside of Regent Park.
Fazra said she will reach out to community members and can already think of a lot of people who would love to be interviewed for the project. Once we have our participants confirmed, we’re planning to develop a series of interview questions. We will then schedule our interviews and photography sessions with our participants and leave time to put the videos together. Altogether, Fazra and I feel really excited about the project, though it may change when we get input from Amina and Jaime who were not able to be there while we worked out the project details.
It was really inspiring to see how quickly we were able to go from having little direction to having a fully-fledged project idea and implementation plan. It can be very challenging to start envisioning these types of media projects because they can take so many different forms and address so many different questions. I was a bit worried at the start of the day that we wouldn’t be able to develop a concrete plan, so it was really amazing to see how quickly our ideas came together. It only took a little bit of guidance and inspiration to get us on the right track.
The Positive Space team members are Amine, Fazra, Daria and Jaime.