My senior year of high school was spent at The Ben Franklin Academy in Atlanta, GA. This school was one of the best things to happen in my life thus far. One of the elements of my education there was large humanities packets that encompassed reading, writing, movies, history, science, etc. Part of the curriculum set for me individually was to do multimedia photography projects for each packet’s theme. The photo above was taken for the packet, Change.
My friend Jennifer, was forever a very tolerant guinea pig of my photography. She is seen above photographed on the streets of Downtown Atlanta around 2:00AM outside of the now closed Rich’s department store. The objective was to create an illusion of time travel. Jennifer is supposed to be outside Rich’s in the 1960s. I like to think the wardrobe indicative of a proper Southern woman on a Sunday, perhaps after church. The hat being the obvious inspiration of that vision. The correlation between this photo and the theme of that particular packet is the location. In the 1960s the lunch counter at this Rich’s location was the site of a famous moment in the Civil Rights Movement. On October 19, 1960 Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as well as Committee on Appeal for Human Rights were arrested outside Rich’s as part of a mass sit-in staged at the legendary lunch counter.
The photos we took that night couldn’t be done at the aforementioned counter, because by the fall of 2000 it no longer existed. However Jennifer and I had a blast time traveling in the cold autumn air on the streets of Atlanta at 2:00AM. I believe had our mothers been aware of the time we’d chosen for the shoot, neither of us would have lived to see graduation the following spring. We managed to finish the shoot unscathed, all in the name of a photo in tribute to those who stood up for what they believed, and an era of Change.
(Blog originally posted on previous site version on May 15, 2009)