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"SEE POTENTIAL" - Emily Schiffer

Saturday, November 07 - 10:30AM to 11:15AM
COM 101

In this talk I will present my public art project, SEE POTENTIAL, which installed large-scale documentary photographs onto abandoned buildings on the South Side of Chicago. The images were used as advertising for community-led revitalization plans in the area. SEE POTENTIAL’s installations invited viewers to sign petitions of support via text messaging.


Our website mapped and tracked each installation’s progress. The talk begins with a brief overview of my project and its relevance from the perspective of the history of Chicago’s South Side. I will discuss how policy, city planning, and the departure of industry contributed to the current racial segregation and lack of infrastructure. One outcome of this history is the current lack of healthy affordable food—the issue that brought me to the South Side.


After covering these contextual topics I will briefly present my photo essay about food deserts in Chicago and explain how my frustration with the limits of documentary photography led me to search for new ways of using my images for tangible social change. Emphasizing the process of transforming an idea into reality, I will describe how community leader Orrin Williams and I co-created SEE POTENTIAL. I will describe our belief in the power of collaboration, which led us to enlist 25 professional photographers in the project. I will then detail how our installations mobilized residents, community leaders, and elected officials, explaining how our community partners used the petitions to make their ideas real. For example, the data helped convince banks to give loans, and garnered support from local government.


I will conclude by inviting photographers and educators to conceive of photographs as the beginning of a socially engaged artistic process instead of a final products.

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