Simone docu-Art

My Story: The longer version:

I began photography in high school, but put it aside for a long time! When I went on a trip to Tanzania, everyone said, “You must get a camera!” So I did. Slowly, I began to cary the camera when I traveled – spending a month in China, two trips to Nicaragua, and some travel in Europe.

The next call came from the organization Madre and an invitation from the Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC – Federation of Cuban Women) to document the lives of Cuban women. I had been to Cuba briefly, but this time I was specifically asked to combine photo documentation with oral history. That set me on the path to what I now call Doc-u-Art.

In a way, moving from New York City to North Carolina in 1992 took me on another sort of documentary journey. I knew next to nothing (full disclosure here) about the South. I could tell you which car to be in to switch to which train to get anywhere in NYC. I had been at the March in Washington in 1963. I remember vividly the first time I visited my aunt in New Orleans saw drinking fountains marked “colored”, but that was all on the surface.

About 6 months after I moved to Chapel Hill, I slid into a special window on the South when a friend and I were standing around after a Martin Luther King day march in support of public workers and housekeeping staff at the University of North Carolina. “Somebody should be telling this story,” he said. That set off a multi-year project. I worked with audio artist Jim Lee to create a sound and visual installation, we are all housekeepers,that traced the struggle against racism by African American workers at UNC over the last century. This project received the Kathryn H. Wallace Award for Artists in Community Service from the Triangle Community Foundation.

While working with the housekeepers, I got to know Keith Edwards, a female campus police officer who had filed a grievance against UNC-Chapel Hill. She lived in the Black neighborhood and had begun working to hold back the gentrification of the area, a process that was replacing long-standing neighbor family homes with student rental. With Keith help, I met many of the elders in the community and produced another photo/oral history, Northside Community: An African-American Neighborhood History. This project was sponsored by the Fund for Southern Communities and grants from the North Carolina Council for the Humanities.

I had begun to notice more and more Hispanic families around the state. A small festival, “Fiesta del Pueblo”, drew large crowds. Men and women from Mexico and Central America were working in construction, hotel services, and “settling out” with their families. I was awarded an NC Artist Fellowship by the Arts Council of North Carolina and created Fotos Del Pueblo, a study of the emerging Hispanic community in North Carolina. I was also hired by Habitat for Humanity of Orange County, N.C., to create an educational exhibition of photographs and text documenting Celebration 2000, a one year project that involved the building of an 11 home sub-division for African-American and Hispanic low-income families.

In 2000 my husband was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Kathmandu, Nepal. This gave me the opportunity to live and photograph in a new community. In Kathmandu, I developed a collaborative project with Megh Raj Manjul, a Nepali poet. At the age of 15, Manjul won his first poetry prize, a coveted writing notebook, a luxury in the rural village of Bhojpur where he grew up. Words became his sword. Manjul became an important voice in Nepali poetry or culture and struggle, an active member of the Progressive Writers’ Group and PEN. Manjul also became my permission. “Go to the shrines of Pashupatinath” he said, “but don’t photograph just the shrines, photograph the sweepers, photograph the people.” Upon my return I received an an Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council for the completion of Tibet andNepal: the People of Shangri-La, an exhibit of photographic compositions accompanied by poems written by Manjul.

My next trip to India and Nepal inspired my work on Memoryscapes. I had accumulated so many images. I was looking for a way to combine narrative with a single two dimensional space. I began with images from my early trip to China, breaking away from the work I had been doing placing multiple images in the same frame, a sequential perspective, and using the ‘digital darkroom’ to compose single works with bouncing echoes between multiple elements. Each image collage, each memoryscape tells a story of witness. In this sense it is a continuation of the exploration of my Doc-u-Art; an effort to express social issues in a creative format, using the tools of documentation in a less mimetic mix.

I also began to look at surfaces. Giving up the chemical darkroom had robbed me a the tactile side of photography. I began a project with some friends printing on whatever we could find: fabric, bamboo papers, scraps of stuff. The result was a series of work printed on metal roof flashing. I loved the return to physically printing work and the new element of surface. I also began to work on fabric pieces, printing with Spoonflower which was, at the time, a local company.

During COVID, like so many others, I looked around my home for something to do that went beyond my own four walls. The result was a book that grew out of some 20 years of volunteer work at prisons, Prison From The Inside Out: One Man’s Journey from a Life Sentence to Freedom, an oral history with William “Mecca” Elmore.

My most recent project combines my commitment to giving voice to people who have been incarcerated and playing with visual stories. That’s Freedom Fotos, an ongoing collection documenting the faces and feelings of the people who are in Reentry, returning from their lives as “inmates” to freedom.