In which I chronicle the process of recording history for a longstanding nonprofit in New York City.
An oral historian's journey.

Monday, November 5, 2012

For your viewing pleasure. . .

I've attached three short slideshow/videos to this post, each one jam-packed with many of the Shiloh pictures that people have been giving me to scan for this project.  I'm calling these slideshows, as a group: Shiloh Voices, Beautiful Faces.  Please enjoy!  


Song: Dancer to the Drum, by Beth Nielsen Chapman

Song: Ella's Song, by Sweet Honey in the Rock

Song: Forever Young, by Bob Dylan


The final one of these videos has captions, the others do not.  

In these videos I tried to represent many different eras in what I've shown, and to represent the pictures that most people have given me.  But beyond the timeframes and the donors represented, I wanted to awaken a sense of joyfulness and compassion towards the faces that you see and those you may have seen before.    For myself, I end up spending a lot of time looking at these faces and hearing the voices of these people in the work that I do--it is sort of a removed, private experience for me but also a very intimate one.  I have the daily experience of studying a look, then a tone, then a thought expressed, for meaning and how that meaning weaves in and out of all the other details.  For the Shiloh people out there, please feel free to let me know if any of the threads I'm compiling ring true or false to you, and thank you again for opening up your stories. 



1 comment:

  1. So many memories here....thanks so much for gathering this together. It is fascinating to see how you as a young person look back on our Shiloh days. All of us who gave a summer or a year or several years to the Shiloh experience know how that experience has shaped our whole lives. Hopefully we helped shape the lives of some we came to help but without a doubt we were transformed in the process. I was in the year round program in 1972 & 1973. I worked in the East Village program with teen runaways. One of my fellow Shiloh workers there, Lee Terry became my wife the next year. This month we celebrate our 39th wedding anniversary.
    There is a photo of me with children on the street in Brownsville at minute 3:04 in the third slide show. It is labeled 1975 but should be 1973. Thanks for your hard work on this. - Steve Tate, Greensboro, NC

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