Top: Kevin Yang, with students Destiny White, Jeremy Thames and Deandre Watt. Bottom: Carter's image of his classmate Treazure Alexander. Lucy Gellman Photos.
High schooler Treazure Alexander looks to the side, her arms pulled back behind her head. Gold hoops dangle from her ears, low enough that they brush a goldenrod-hued sweatshirt. On the shelf behind her, pez-colored bags of potato chips and popcorn glow in the bright, artificial light. She is completely statuesque, frozen in time.
In another universe, this might be a gallery in the Louvre or Victoria & Albert, reserved for Greco-Roman sculptures. But this is The Marketa on Temple Street, more Jamel Shabazz than a stuffy hall of marble and stone.
It’s one of dozens of images in “New Haven, Revisited: The City Through The Eyes of Youth,” running May 16 through July 31 at the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. Curated by Kevin Yang and Fany Kuzmova, both students in the Yale School of Architecture, the exhibition features photography from students at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and High School in the Community.
Every image is taken on a disposable camera, meant to capture a specific moment and perspective in the city’s history. And it does: in dozens of photographs, students tell a story about New Haven’s present and also its recent past, suffused with an early-2000s nostalgia that viewers may not have even known existed.
“The main driver here is that there’s so much to learn from New Haven,” said Yang, a third year at the Yale School of Architecture. “It’s insane to me that people [students] stay inside and read their books all day. We do so much with the built environment and then none of these ideas make their way out [of the classroom.]”
The idea for the show began over a year ago, in a class Yang took with Professor Elihu Rubin. After moving to New Haven for grad school, he was struck—and frustrated—by the stark divide between Yale and the vibrant, historic city around it. Rubin was a bridge; he got the class outside and into the city.
As he explored, Yang learned about New Haven’s long history, including Mayor Dick Lee’s mid-century vision for “Urban Renewal” that razed stores, destroyed homes and chopped up neighborhoods. He became interested not only in “spaces that were lost,” the scars of which are often still visible today, but also how New Haveners were putting them back together.
While his peers stayed in the classroom, he was often eager to get out and explore the city that was (and is) temporarily his home. He met Doreen Abubakar, who helped build the West River Water Festival and Newhallville Learning Corridor. He talked to neighbors and neighborhood boosters, from members of the Armory Community Garden to former Mayor John DeStefano to Mike and Sheila Shanklin of the Greater Dwight Development Corporation. He also connected with educators, ultimately presenting his work to a group of New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) librarians.
Top: Randall, a photographer who started teaching at the school in 2021. Bottom: Alexander assembles a row of photos.
At some point, Co-Op librarian Mark Osenko connected him to Chris Randall, who has been teaching photography at Co-Op since 2021. Meanwhile, Yang was able to secure a grant from Kodak for disposable cameras, which he distributed to students at a series of workshops last fall into this winter and spring.
“New Haven is the most interesting city I’ve lived in,” Kuzmova added excitedly as students assembled open photo books, the images taped neatly between accordion folds. As rows of photos emerged—there are five per display, and a few dozen displays in the show—they painted a portrait of a city striving gently forward, from late Dixwell Avenue buses to shots of a downtown that has transformed drastically in the last decade.
Across their displays, students have presented a sweeping portrait of New Haven, from its greenspaces and playgrounds to sidewalks dotted with early spring foliage. In some of the images, the tops of buildings soar upwards, their brick roofs and steeples stark against the low-hanging sky. In others, spring appears in full bloom, as a lens clicks and catches a cluster of daisies or violets that have made their way through the thawing ground.
Jeremy Thames, who is a senior.
Tuesday morning, a dozen of Randall’s students filled the library’s lower level, arranging photos as they tore into bagels and cream cheese that Yang had set aside. At one table, senior Destiny White pulled up a series of quotations, reading them aloud. Beside her, classmate Jeremy Thames sifted through images, uncapped a white gel pen, and began to transcribe the words in neat, bubbly handwriting.
In one image, a white car pulled up across from College Street Music Hall, the sunshine so bright it seemed cinematic. In another, the creamy white exterior of a church peeked out from the end of an alleyway, suggesting a clear day ahead.
“Love is patient, love is kind,” White read, and Thames contemplated whether a photo of Francisco Del Carpio-Beltran’s 2020 mural on Orange Street was the right place for it. She scrolled through a few quotes silently, and Thames focused on a wide angle shot of the New Haven Green, the buildings around it suddenly small. A lone, forlorn bench looked out over a sprawl of grass, the trees still bare in the winter sunlight.
“Anybody got a picture of the early early morning?” asked senior Deandre Watt. White picked one up, the image covered in a kind of grainy haze, and passed it over to him. As she worked, she said it reminded her of a polaroid camera she received for Christmas two years ago.
“I just like taking pictures,” she said as she fitted a construction paper frame around a row of photos. “It makes me feel, like, excited.”
Top: Ari Thorpe.
At the end of the table, Watt studied the photos he had selected, pulling them close to his face as he finalized the order. For him, the project was an exercise in remembering the city that raised him: he revisited some of his favorite childhood haunts, particularly the playground, trails, fountain and duck pond in Edgewood Park.
“You don’t see kids playing outside anymore. That’s the most unfortunate thing to me,” he said. Growing up close to the Ellsworth Avenue fire station, he spent hundreds of hours in Edgewood Park, running amongst the trees as they reawaken each spring. “As a kid, I really loved being outside.”
With the camera as his guide, “I remembered all the friends that I used to spend time with,” he continued. “This gives people a chance to see places that would not normally see themselves in and a chance to celebrate the community. It’s great.”
It was the same motivation that led him to curate several of his peers’ photographs, rather than his own, he said. As a row of photos emerged, he focused on shots filled with daylight and shadow, interested in how the two played off of each other. At the center of the images, a streetlight cast long, spindly shadows against the ground, the honeyed light radiating out.
Mariana Garcia with her images, including the class' favorite photograph.
Of over 100 images, they also voted on a class favorite—the top of Center Church on the Green jutting into the sky, a t-shaped crucifix spindly against the clouds. In the picture, junior Mariana Garcia has captured the structure’s roof and bell tower from far below, standing on the sidewalk outside the sanctuary. Around it, the sky is painterly, with soft, low-hanging white clouds and green patches of tree cover. The leaves, thick and fresh, signal that it is spring.
“I pass it [the church] every day,” and the camera gave her a chance to take a closer look, Garcia said. While she lives in the city’s East Shore neighborhood, she walks by the New Haven Green at least five days a week, on her way to and from Co-Op. It’s where the 206 bus picks up, ferrying her from the center of New Haven back to the water that has defined so much of its history.
In Garcia’s hand, five photographs fell into a narrative, jumping from outdoor to indoor spaces. At the top, a print showed St. Michael’s Church from the street, its dome against a gray sheet of sky. Directly beside it, Garcia pictured her younger sister in a parking garage, looking up at a light fixture as darkness fell around her. The result is theatrical, as if her sister is not in a damp and dark parking structure, but about to step onto the stage for a great Chekhovian drama.
Top: Daniel Carter, Jr.
Beneath it, a viewer can sense her interest in under-loved spaces, from a graffiti-sprayed wall just outside of downtown to the inside of the Burger King on Whalley Avenue, where long lights hang over the tables and fluorescents shine above. Garcia has a sharp eye—she finds a reflection in a puddle, or a dramatic angle with a light—and it feels like a reclamation, recognizing places that invite gathering and socializing without any sort of pretext.
“It lets me capture moments,” she said.
One table over, Daniel Carter, Jr. used his photos to tell a story of spring, with pops of green, purple and yellow that showed New Haven bursting into bloom. At the top, the deep yellow fabric of Alexander's sweatshirt seemed to start a conversation with a tangle of butter-toned daisies below. In the middle, a classmate reached her arms around a tree trunk, face pressed to the rough brown bark.
“When I take pictures, I pay attention to color and shape,” Carter said, adding that he still finds a childlike wonder in nature and spring, as the world reawakens around him like clockwork. “This is a day in the life, through my eyes.”
“I think this project shows the beautiful side of New Haven,” chimed in Ari Thorpe, a junior at the school.
“New Haven, Revisited: The City Through The Eyes of Youth,” runs May 16 through July 31 on the lower level of the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.