Two City Bureau fellows on why they chose to center community voices in their award-nominated audio/photo essay.
By Sarah Conway
City Bureau reporting fellow Sierra Council conducting an interview with Woodlawn resident Aaron Haroon Garel. (Photo: Max Herman)
While much of the local and national coverage of the Woodlawn neighborhood has focused on the Obama Presidential Library project and a sharp increase in housing prices, City Bureau fellows Sierra Council and Max Herman decided instead to focus on the personal. What does “home” mean to lifelong Woodlawn residents amidst rapid neighborhood change, they wondered?
The result of months of documentation was ‘This is My Home’, published with the Chicago Reader, which is now nominated as 2019 essay of the year with the Chicago Review of Books.
City Bureau’s Sarah Conway sat down with Council and Herman on a cool day in November to discuss their creative process and storytelling techniques to capture a “neighborhood in transition.”
Why did you choose to focus on Woodlawn as a neighborhood this spring in your reporting fellowship at City Bureau?
Sierra Council: Initially we were focused on looking at how development and land ownership had impacted Woodlawn and Hyde Park. Every neighborhood has its own fabric, its own stories, its own history and its own culture. Yet, when looking into neighborhood narratives in Chicago, no one really talks about Woodlawn, specifically, unless they are talking about the Obama Presidential Center or grouping this neighborhood with the areas surrounding it.
Max Herman: The Obama Presidential Center was a conversation starter with a lot of folks because it is there and happening, but we didn't want to make it the focus of the story of Woodlawn. Together we led with the idea of just talking to people to see what story would come from it.
How did you approach people to get them to share such personal stories?
S.C.: The initial reporting was often just observing and being present in Woodlawn. Oftentimes, that looked like sitting in a coffee shop and talking to folks. I made a commitment really early on that I need to know the neighborhood before I can report on it and that meant I needed to be there more often. I wanted to understand the inner dynamics of the community: Where do parents go? Where do kids play? What are the busy intersections? What are the community assets? Then it was a matter of, let's sit down with the coffee shop owner and actually talk to people who come here often, or let me walk around the neighborhood and talk to the librarians.
How did you decide over time to focus on individuals’ personal histories in the neighborhood?
S.C.: Originally, in initial conversations, we would frame questions around, how do you feel about the University of Chicago and students in your neighborhood? It was really surprising to me upfront that most people didn't care about either or, at least, that wasn’t the main concern in their mind. It almost felt like I was pressing a story onto a community that no one really cared about. Once I realized that, it was easy then to open up a dialogue around what do you think is actually impacting or influencing your neighborhood.
One of the first conversations I had was with a person at the Chicago Public Library Coleman Branch. She made me aware that there were other dynamics in the neighborhood that we weren't even aware of because we had come into the project focused on one angle and she blew my mind with a whole new perspective and history. She told me about 63rd and Cottage, and how that intersection used to be full of jazz clubs. Woodlawn in her mind used to be this historically vibrant community center for the whole South Side and she wanted us to record that part of history.
You both touched on letting people lead in interviews to discover the arc to their own piece and neighborhood story. What were your techniques doing that?
M.H.: We let people take it where they wanted to in interviews. For instance, Abdul Karim was very much about the history of jazz clubs on Cottage Grove but he didn't care as much about developments and that was OK. I appreciated the way that Sierra would set up these casual pre-interviews where it was about just getting to know each other and then doing a more formal recorded interview at a set date.
S.C.: The benefit of the City Bureau fellowship as a whole is that you are not working on these one- or two-week deadlines where you have to file a story by a certain date. Even though 10 weeks feels quick, we still had time to build these relationships. For me, the second time doing this fellowship, I learned the importance of building relationships. The story may come when it comes, say in July even though the fellowship is over in May. What is more important than trying to get the story done is to build the right relationships so the story can tell itself. I spent a lot of time in the beginning, for better or worse, without a recorder when I would first talk to people.
Oftentimes in that space, the questions could be turned back on me. People would ask me about the community I grew up in and why do I care so much about this story and their home, Woodlawn. Those were spaces for exchanging information and in a sense sharing power. By the time we got to the second or third conversation, we were a lot more comfortable with each other.
It let people bring what they wanted to their own story. I think of Ms. Fuller who brought millions of photos to our meeting. It was one of those things where we couldn't direct the agenda [laughing]. Ms. Fuller was a crossing guard in the neighborhood and she wanted to go through every single image with us around old Woodlawn and block club parties. It was great. It wasn't what we thought we needed at the time but it gave us context for the neighborhood and it was about building trust between us and Ms. Fuller. Let's look at the pictures and think about where this can take the story, or to learn a new direction that we aren't thinking about.
Longtime Woodlawn businesses seen along 63rd Street, just east of Cottage Grove Avenue. (Photo: Max Herman)
Max, how did you approach letting sources lead in the composition of the images?
M.H.: Knowing which locations were meaningful to our sources was crucial in getting these photos. Most of the photos were taken after we had really deep conversations with them so I knew where to go.
How did you decide on a format for this story?
M.H.: One thing we knew was the audio. It was important to us both that people's stories could be heard through the audio paired with a visual portrait.
Looking back at the experience what does the title 'This is my home' mean to you?
S.C.: It makes me low key emotional hearing that title now. I remember when Ms. Sara [Pitcher] said that to me in an interview. It was this very intimate interview where she said, "This is my home. I would not want to live anywhere else." I felt like that resonated so deeply with me because oftentimes we take things and we make an issue the centerpiece of a community’s story, or we take the loudest collective voices as ‘the voice’ for a community but forget that communities are also made up of individuals’ memories and histories.
We are invested but at the end of the day, it is a story. Eventually, we as journalists will go on with our lives and the same with a lot of developers that come in and build something. They, too, will go on with their lives, like the University of Chicago students who come in for four years. But for people from Woodlawn, this is where they spend 20, 30, 50, 70 years deeply invested in a space. It's personal for them and when she said it, it was so personal for her that their stories became personal for me, too.
Sierra Council (far left) and Max Herman (center) hosted Public Newsroom 122: What is your vision for Woodlawn? at The Green Living Room on October 24. (Photo: Andrea Hart)
This fall you two hosted a Public Newsroom at the Green Living Room in Woodlawn. People came to see the photos on display and talk to some of the people you photographed. Why was it important to you to host this event?
S.C.: We wanted the story to be accessible for community members. The Public Newsroom allowed the story to not just be published in the Reader but to also be “published” in the community, in a sense. Max and I agreed early on that we are not centering ourselves in this story. So this event was a way to center community members in a conversation at a night at the Public Newsroom — the good, the bad and what they'd fix in their home. It's about the people.
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