Meeting History: A Garfield Park Citizen Archive
“In Those Pictures, You Can See the Community” … Many neighborhoods across America, still wear the scars of past civil unrest. It’s no different in Garfield Park where, according to a 2020 ProPublica investigation, systemic divestment marks the streets and taints how the neighborhood is perceived. Recognizing that these neighborhoods are often viewed through the prism of what’s been lost, CatchLight Local Chicago Fellow Samantha Cabrera Friend and CatchLight collaborated with ProPublica to visually commemorate those who remain and their histories. To do this, Cabrera Friend worked with residents in East and West Garfield Park to build a citizen archive, scanning and organizing photographs from their family scrapbooks, church pamphlets and household picture frames. The resulting body of images links past and present representations of multiple generations, families and communities, and offers a reflection of them that span decades.
Meeting History: A Garfield Park Citizen Archive was produced in collaboration with ProPublica, and the Institute for Non Profit News as part of the CatchLight Local Chicago Visual Desk
Contemporary Photographs and Archive Organized by Samantha Cabrera Friend
Text by Tony Briscoe
CatchLight Editorial Team: Jenny Jacklin-Stratton and Max Herman
ProPublica Editorial Team: Jillian Kumagai, Agnes Chang and Lisa Larson-Walker
MEETING HISTORY IN THE COMMUNITY
Archival collections act as an official record in which people can see themselves and their place in history. To make these visuals accessible to the public an exhibition titled, “Meeting History: A Garfield Park Citizen Archive,” is on view at the Garfield Park Conservatory until June 22, 2024. More information about the exhibition and current hours can be found here.
GATHER AWARD IN COMMUNITY-CENTERED JOURNALISM: FINALIST
Meeting History was a finalist for the 2022 OJA Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism. A lightning talk about the project presented by Samantha Cabrera Friend and Jenny Jacklin-Stratton can be viewed online here.
On Friday, September 17, CatchLight and ProPublica held a virtual panel discussion revisiting systemic disinvestment through archival visuals in Garfield Park , the historically Black neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago.
The panel, moderated by Tony Briscoe of ProPublica, included Garfield Park resident Annette Britton, CatchLight Local Chicago Fellow Samantha Cabrera Friend, and Stacie Williams, Division Chief, Archives and Special Collections, at the Chicago Public Library and a member of The Blackivists, a collective of professional Black archivists. Watch a recording of the conversation below:
Endnote
All participants have granted permission to Catchlight, the Chicago Public Library and ProPublica to publish and exhibit the photographs they shared from their personal collections. While scanning Samantha Cabrera Friend documented information about each picture by asking residents to identify people or places shown and using written or produced notes on the prints themselves (such as a date). In some cases, captions indicate a general date for the time the image was made, such as the late 1960s, reflecting the source’s best recollection, or were unable to be dated. In other cases, people have not been identified when their name wasn’t known or couldn’t be recalled.
While Cabrera Friend digitized the archival images for future preservation and is providing digital copies for the archive’s owners, the physical photographs remain in the possession of participants. We express our gratitude to them for sharing their time, their memories and their stories of East and West Garfield Park.