Mirror Magazine
Reflecting Society’s Image Back on Itself
Established 2023
Mirror Magazine
is a collaborative-multimedia project to document urban inequality in New York City.
The significance of “mirror” comes from the power of the camera to mirror reality back to us in a way we haven’t seen it before.
By capturing New York City through the camera and with a pointed focus, we can make clear to those with the power to make change what part of the bigger picture they’re missing.
The project is the fruit of Nolen Phya, a photographer, urban planner and life long New Yorker. It is part of his thesis to complete his Masters of City Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The significance of “mirror” comes from the power of the camera to mirror reality back to us in a way we haven’t seen it before.
By capturing New York City through the camera and with a pointed focus, we can make clear to those with the power to make change what part of the bigger picture they’re missing.
The project is the fruit of Nolen Phya, a photographer, urban planner and life long New Yorker. It is part of his thesis to complete his Masters of City Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
M.B.
How can we use photography as a tool for placemaking that serves community?
Mapping & Results
There is a dedicated effort to document cities through the use of panoramic technology like Google Street maps, but more often than not, the quality of the images from these sites pales in comparison to photographs from the 20th century to early 2000s. Despite being older, film often carries more detail and natural artistic quality than digital cameras. Besides the quality of film, we also used it because the negatives can be stored for quite a long time (1,000 years to be exact) making them a powerful archival medium.
Below is a map of each photographer’s work. Across the team there were a total of 9 photographers who managed to turn in 149 photographs to be geotagged in time for the project’s spring closure. Among each photographer there was a general trend of sticking to a few areas around the city, a reflection of where they live, work and spend free time. Through each photographer a unique sense of exactly what “displacement” looks like in each neighborhood began to form that is visible in the work they produced.
Methodology
As a participatory photography study, there are a lot of moving parts and people to this project. To help clarify the process of organizing all the elements, you can refer to the timeline list above. The project can be broken down into 4 general stages:
1 . Workshop & Film Distribution: In the 1st stage, the workshop stage, photographers were invited to gather for a formal introduction to the project and each other. To create an environment of collaboration not just among the co-researchers but also other existing creatives in the city, we tried a workshop introduction at Photodom NYC, a Black owned photography shop & studio located in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Photographers were recruited through word of mouth and Instagram, a popular place for photographers to share work. In total there were 11 photographers involved in the workshop.
At this point, a few key concepts were introduced, most importantly the maps that photographers would use to guide them in their work. The maps selected to guide this project come from NYC’s Department of City Planning and Housing, Preservation & Development. These maps are part of the Displacement Risk Map which is itself a subsidiary project of the Equitable Development Data Explorer.
Created through Local Law 78 of 2021 through the City Council, the map illustrates the level of displacement risk in different neighborhoods as compared to each other. Displacement refers to the involuntary movement of an individual or family from their home or neighborhood, whether as the result of eviction, unaffordable housing costs, or poor-quality housing. There are many factors that may contribute to residents' risk of displacement, though there is no standard methodology for how to measure it. Building on data points listed in Local Law 78 of 2021, DCP and HPD identified a complete set of data points and a methodology to combine the data points into an index based on research, precedents from other cities, and conversations with stakeholders. Three major subindexes make up the displacement index including population vulnerability, housing conditions and market pressure.
After being introduced to the map in 4x different ways (displacement, population vulnerability, housing conditions & market pressure) the photographers were tasked with making their own maps to either counter or confirm what the city has created. They had creative freedom to express this on blank maps of the NYC Neighborhood Tabulation Areas used in the NYC Displacement Index. These maps were “hypotheses” that they then explore with the photographs (data points) they take in the field.
Initially in coming up with this project, I thought of making my own displacement index. However, after doing more research and seeing the map created by NYC HPD and DCP, I realized that the value of my research lies not in recreating what others have done in another way, but adding a fresh perspective and lens to that work. The analysis that this project will rely on will be very qualitative, largely because the main tool of analysis is the camera. However, at the same time, the volume of photos this project will produce can also be used for more detailed quantitative analysis.
2. Field Work & Exploration: Once given film and instructions at the first workshop, participatory photographers were free to go wherever they wanted to collect data. To document results from the field in post production, photographers were instructed to take a photo with a smartphone of every location they shoot.
To train photographers on the process for the project, we went on a group photo walk around Cypress Hills/City Line, Brooklyn. The walk was a chance to discuss the urban planning concepts at the heart of the project as well as give feedback, instruction and assistance on any photography. The area was chosen as a photowalk location because of the area’s high displacement risk and proximity to Photodom.
Photography is an invasive art. Much of what the photographer documents with their camera on the street is technically public, but it’s also often the private moments people have in that space that make a good photograph. Balancing the need to gather research while respecting people’s privacy is basic to all research, and photography is no different. As such, I used the well established PhotoVoice framework to guide photographers on the ethics of creating art in public spaces.Some key principles we went over included consent, choice and the ethics around photographing minors.
3. Development & Printing: Once photographers finished shooting through a roll of film, they were instructed to drop off their photos in a shared google drive folder. From there I was able to collect photos and prepare them for any printing. To help guide my analysis and final presentation, I asked each photographer to pick out four photos for me to highlight. For each of these photos, I asked the researchers to write a 300 words or less description for each.
4. Exhibition & Discussion: The last and final stage of the project involved presenting the work of the researchers in a way that links back to the original question of how photography can be used to better understand urban inequality. Letting the photos that the researchers capture sit in a document formatted in a traditional academic context is not the best way to present the work and experiment with using the medium to communicate to policymakers, planners, artists and other professionals involved in the design of the built environment.
To that end, the presentation of the work beyond this document involves a web archive and photomap (aka this site). The web archive is a useful way of looking at all the photos researchers captured during the project while the map is a useful way of examining that material with specific filters. These filters are limited but not exclusive to the researcher that took the photo, the neighborhood in which the photo was taken and overlapping data coming from the HPD/DCP Displacement Index Map visible below.
Photographers making maps at Photodom for Workshop #1
NYC Displacement Risk Index. Source: NYC HPD & DCP