AND YET WE LIVE
Images of the South Bronx

Artist's Statement

The South Bronx is considered one of the worst ghettos on the East Coast. In the late 1970's the South Bronx burned at a rate of 10 city blocks per day for over four years.This crisis led immigrant families into fire shelters, and on to the streets. The circumstances were due to a number of reasons:

1) The changing welfare laws that stated if you could prove your housing was unlivable, the state would upgrade your living conditions. Many people destroyed their domiciles in an attempt to upgrade. The State became so overwhelmed with relocating people that they could only house them in temporary fire shelters. Some families remained in those shelters for up to five years.

2) Slumlords decided to use arson as a means of making money opposed to fixing up old housing stock.

3) The city of New York was in fiscal crisis and cut back on water, garbage and fire service. By the time the fire department was able to answer a call for a single apartment on fire, the entire building would be up in flames.

What remained, 10 years later, was a desolate wasteland.

My photographic work in the South Bronx represents the outcome of the fires and housing destruction left by the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid 1970's. The brighter side of the Bronx is people taking the initiative to improve their neighborhoods. Yet, it is often overshadowed by the government relocating people to worse housing, tearing down skeletons of buildings to be replaced by factories instead of renovating, and continuing to ignore the communities fighting for a sense of place.

I stumbled across the South Bronx by accident one day in 1983, simply by taking the wrong subway train uptown. What I saw shocked me. People were living in third world conditions, right here, in the prosperous America of the 1980's. I was amazed people could live in these often shantytown conditions. I started photographing and talking to people about their lives.

As a photographer, I have tried to portray the South Bronx by immersing myself in the community, working with the grass roots organization The South Bronx People For Change. I have attempted to show a fair and honest picture of a devastated community that is still very much alive and united. This work was the search for and the discovery of a people in their environment as they interact with that environment and survive.

From my first accidental visit to the South Bronx I always wondered, "How can people live in these conditions?" I soon realized that the question was really "How DO people live in these conditions?" The people of the South Bronx do live, and they live with a sense of dignity and integrity in a situation most of us would find unthinkable. — JM

I was hungry
And you landed on the moon
I was hungry
And you told me to wait
I was hungry
And you set-up a commission
I was hungry
And you told me I shouldn't be
I was hungry
And you had missile bills to pay

--Graffiti on the wall of Grand Concourse Village, South Bronx, 1985

Email: jana@jlmphotography.com

Home Page: www.jlmphotography.com

Other information:
©Jana Marcus 1985. All Rights Reserved.