"Voyage toward the center of the City"
Discovering Onondaga Creek
This summer I taught a landscape photography course for a local organization called Canopy. Canopy started in 1999 as a spin-off of Centers for Nature Education's Syracuse Neighborhood Nature Opportunity project, funded by the Gifford Foundation.
Canopy is involved in a project to increase public awareness about Onondaga Creek, especially on the Southside of Syracuse. For one of their projects, they teamed up with Citizens United to Rebuild Neighborhoods (CURN) and had Girl Scouts conduct interviews with residents and document the area by taking photographs.
My teaching role was to help the girls tell their own story using photographic images. Following our session they took a tour of the creek and documented what they saw.
Afterwards, I was happy to see how the girls were transformed: They became more articulate and self-confident as they discussed their photos and tour of the creek (via bus). The course taught them to see, to reflect and to share beyond my expectations.
I would like to thank Canopy member and Syracuse resident Aggie Lane and the Girl Scouts for awakening my interest in the creek. I am grateful too that Common Council President Bea Gonzales shared her own creek tour experience, which she described eloquently in an OP-ED column for our local paper.
Since I was unable to attend the bus tour for personal reasons, I was invited for a canoe tour a few weeks later. My journey on Onondaga Creek started under Dorwin Avenue and finished in Franklin Square.
Here are some photographs.
CLICK THE PHOTO TO BEGIN
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