You’ve seen them: the ubiquitous, glossy
rectangles gracing the spinning racks at tourist sites and convenience stores across the globe… the Important Monument,
the Historical Site, the Beautiful Park, the Famous Building… Postcards provide the images that depict a sense of place.
Or do they?
When cities are
represented as a collection of glossy images much is left out. Day-to-day experiences and places that shape regular
lives are overlooked.
As photographs,
postcards are also a uniquely accessible art form. But they’re rarely intellectualized or critiqued, often for good
reason. The intersection of these two observations generated the ongoing public art project Greetings from
MY City, created & directed by designers Gretchen Schneider and Erika Zekos. The project celebrates the diversity
of a city’s unique people and places through a series of new postcard designs.
In an effort to engage the communities at the heart of this exploration, young students are
given disposable cameras to create photo essays that depict the spirit of their communities. Whether defined by racial
identity, architectural style, urban density, landscape, class or culture, the home neighborhoods of these students include
places rarely, if ever, seen in conventional tour guides or on the familiar glossy postcards; often these neighborhoods are
entirely left off the map.
Students
learned about cameras, composition, and careful observation. They examined their city through mapping exercises, and discussed
places that were important to them, along with public perceptions of those places. Through a guided process, they selected
photographs to be printed as postcards. The postcard backs feature a city map that includes all of their neighborhoods, along
with a caption that says simply, “I am …, I live in …, This is MY city”.
Begun in 2004, Greetings from MY City has reached dozens of young
photographers and continues to grow. The photographers for Greetings From MY City are middle school students and the
postcards on this site represent recent programs in Boston and Holyoke, MA.
In Boston, apprentices in Citizen Schools' 8th Grade Academy and students from the Fourth Church
Music + Art Program in South Boston created photo essays of their own neighborhoods during 2004 + 2005. Photographer + "Citizen
Teacher" Jamara Wakefield guided the youth in their photography. Brendan Ferriter assisted. In Holyoke sixth grade
students from Social Studies class at the John J. Lynch Middle school participated.
