Katherine Natasha

My Personal Statement... Thing

This fall I started my first lesson in urban planning. I completed a photojournalism project of East Cleveland, a dismal suburb of Cleveland I was taught to fear and avoid. When the town was founded it had Victorian, Mediterranean, and Gothic styled mansions lining the streets, but now it’s suffering from an economic depression lasting for decades. Old photographs of East Cleveland drove away the judgmental feelings I had about a town I never knew. I wanted to pass on this inspiration, so I photographed the buildings around town, hoping to capture some sense of the city.

Standard Oil, Euclid Avenue

I started my project on East Cleveland’s famed Euclid Avenue. My favorite mansion from the golden years was a white Victorian near Noble Road, but when I found it, it was burned down. Down a block was a garage looking like an English cottage whose olive and cream paint was chipped and whose windows were boarded. The sign over the garage read “Standard Oil Company.” Unbelievable! This was one of the first buildings of Rockefeller’s billion-dollar corporation. Yet here, it was a lounge for beggars.

Like an archeologist, I found fragments of a forgotten world that I pieced together into a story. I wanted my audience to have a lingering respect and compassion for a dying town. When I showed my progress to my photography teacher Mrs. Starinsky, she asked why I hadn’t worked with people.

“You usually jump for the chance to shoot people before objects.” Mrs. Starinsky labels me as a “people-person.”

“Yes… But people think that all East Clevelanders are thugs. Prejudice people not from around here wouldn’t pity them just because they’re poor and Black. They’ll come up with reasons not to feel for the people, but let’s see if they can blame the Standard Oil garage for being abandoned.” My audience needed to first see the supposed staples of wealth crumbling before they saw the people suffering.

“Vision is the most powerful sense we have.” I tested this concept with my project. I posted a few pictures in the school gallery. Students wanted to know about the mansions and the memorials. Teachers proudly recognized scenes and buildings. “That’s in East Cleveland?” they would say. Some of the girls picked out houses they would buy. Mrs. Starinsky reminisced about running around the East Cleveland Cemetery and pulling pranks on the 120th Street Bridge. My audience wasn’t talking about stereotypes or thinking pessimistically. I was excited to think if I can get teenagers interested in a town they all feared entering, the same strategy will work on politicians, civil leader and regional investors who never heard of the place!

I want to be an urban planner; yet even if my pictures of a burned down Victorian house turns heads, it is my worth and the worth of others I want to renovate more than any building. Photographing East Cleveland has given me a first step in crafting not fine art as much as motivational art.

Wall of Sorrow: A Memorial To the Murdered and Missing Children of Greater Cleveland

East Cleveland Community Theater

I should probably get the name of this church...