“The View from Here: Accessing Art Through Photography” runs through Nov. 22. at the Yale Schwarzman Center. Pictured in focus in Julie Hajducky's "From Here." Lucy Gellman Photos; all artwork by student artists.
The girl turns toward the camera, her eyes wary, or maybe just exhausted. In front of her, a fence splits the space, throwing a lattice of shadows across her face and onto the sidewalk. Her left hand clutches the fence, close enough to the lens that it could be reaching out to the viewer. Stay Woke, her sweatshirt reads in clean, tall white lettering. The shutter clicks, freezing the moment.
The photo is one of dozens in “The View from Here: Accessing Art Through Photography,” running at the Yale Schwarzman Center now through Nov. 22. A collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art and the Lens Media Lab at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the exhibition brings together three cohorts of student photographers, documenting the city during the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic and into the present.
Installed across two floors of the Yale Schwarzman Center, it tells a story of how these artists, all New Haven high school students and alumni, see both the world and themselves in it. At a time when young people are rarely asked how and what they think—despite legislation that affects them directly—it’s both refreshing and candid.
“It was awesome for me to start capturing my city,” said Prince Davenport, a senior at Highville Charter School who is headed to Kenyon College in the fall. “It just gave me a different eye.”
His words echo through the show, which breathes new, vibrant life into the 1901 Beaux-Arts building that houses the Schwarzman Center. On a second-floor rotunda, photographs cover the walls, each with its own relationship to New Haven (and in some images, Bridgeport and New York). A grandmother’s eyes meet the viewer’s, time etched into her skin. A quintet of pugs strain against their leashes as they try to bolt down the sidewalk. Three brick condominiums appear through a window, framed with faded red-and-white curtains that make the whole shot look like an antique.
Some images, like Davenport’s 2024 “Juxtaposing Reflections,” challenge a viewer to look more closely at a place they think they know intimately already. Taken just beyond downtown, the image shows two basement windows, each bordered neatly by red brick. On the left, a fluorescent light is visible through the window, and it makes a viewer wonder what might be inside. On the right, an apartment building appears in the window pane, as if a mirror has materialized in the sunlight.
“With photography, I can visually capture these memories,” Davenport said. While he was already immersed in the arts—Davenport spends much of his time as a musician—it helps him remember New Haven at a specific time, before the city changes up on him once again.
Top: "Juxtaposing Reflections." Bottom: "Soft Focus."
So too in Abiba Biao’s 2022 “Soft Focus,” a fuzzy, through-the-looking-glass kind of view of Pistachio Cafe downtown. In the image, a figure sits forward on a plush sofa, scrolling on their phone as one leg crosses over the other. A viewer who knows the location—Chapel and Howe Streets, in the city’s Dwight neighborhood—can almost hear the rising chatter and passing traffic, the inevitable sirens that cut through downtown at all hours of the day.
And yet, Biao has made the scene her own, adding just enough fuzz and distortion for a viewer to second guess everything about it.
“My life is characterized by the people around me, and I seek to share their stories through writing and photography,” she has written in an accompanying statement. “Journalism has strengthened my interpersonal skills, making me ask myself, ‘Who am I going to talk to today?’”
Top: "Alex and Alfie."
It’s a gift, these sweet, sometimes quirky snapshots of daily life in a world that often feels on fire. In Iyla Bhandary-Alexander’s 2023 “Alex and Alfie,” her eponymous subjects stare out at the camera, Alex wide-eyed and intense as Alfie half-snoozes on her lap. There’s a tenderness there: Alex may be focused on the photographer, but her attention is also on the dog, who is wearing a large plastic cone around his neck.
Bhandary-Alexander has a sharp eye: the photograph captures all the detail of the moment, but also pictures the surrounding room, where unframed art covers the walls and flags hang suspended from the ceiling in a timeless, oh-so-very-high school aesthetic. While the photograph is printed in greyscale, the room is also filled with natural light, making the space feel both cozy and expansive.
“I don’t think I missed a single class,” said Bhandary-Alexander, a junior at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) who agreed with several peers that the program pushed her to see the world around her differently. Photography, both literally and figuratively, gave her a completely new lens on her subjects.
Hajducky among works by her peers. To see all of the work in the show, click on the link at the bottom of the article.
Other photographers let themselves get weird, intimate, artsy and serious, sometimes all at once. In her 2021 “Blurred Perfection,” Laila Smith captures two of her peers lying in the grass, their heads almost touching. Sunlight soaks the frame, and for a moment, everything feels right with the world. But this is high school in 2021: life itself has been upended by a global pandemic, and these students are trying to figure out their new normal. To call the shot "perfection" feels both cheeky and right on time.
Those layers of meaning unfold again in Mia Coppola’s 2022 “Similarity vs. Difference,” which shows two tenagers—maybe they are siblings, maybe peers—framed by a car and looking intently at each other. The girl at the right smiles, almost fiercely, and suddenly she seems so young. The figure at the left looks back, a certain world-weariness on his face. The American flag is everywhere: in the background, over the car, on their cotton t-shirts. It’s up to the viewer to figure out how and why it got there.
Some of the most intriguing images in the show are those that take on a sense of experiment. In Zoe Stowe’s 2022 “Revealing Flora,” the photographer has pictured herself in a mirror, draped in a long white dress and floral shawl. Pink and purple flowers bloom from her hair, hands, and wrists. Behind her, a tree raises its green branches to the sky. It’s as if she is Persephone, willing the earth back to life; Stowe looks at the ground as if she is seeing it for the first time.
There’s a meeting of worlds here: Stowe’s is magical, like something straight out of a Pre Raphaelite canvas or scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But around her, the scene is totally pedestrian. Green grass, still strewn with dead autumn leaves, reaches back to meet the wood shingles of a house. A car and patio table are visible in the background. This could be New Haven any day of the week—except for the spectacle unfolding at its center, which feels fully sublime.
“All the time, they were like, just take a billion photos,” Stowe recalled at an opening reception earlier this month. A senior in visual arts at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, she said she appreciated the number of assignments and prompts in the program, which encouraged her to experiment.
Top: Virginia Karina Vasquez Antonio, "Untitled," 2022.
In this sense, the installation itself is also a quiet, poetic and sincere reclamation of a space that exists in New Haven, but has never quite been of New Haven. As a predominantly white institution, Yale has never seemed particularly interested in opening its doors to city residents: not when New Haven abolitionists tried to build an HBCU in 1831; not during the Panther trials and May Day 1970; not when the university fired, re-hired, and then threatened Corey Menafee within an inch of his job for talking to the press.
Not this spring, when students camped out in Beinecke Plaza to show their support of Palestine and were assaulted by the police. And not, perhaps, when the university took a $162.8 million gift from Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who has profited enormously off of people losing their homes and deforestation in the Amazon, that came with naming rights.
In the midst of that history, these students—some of New Haven’s brightest young artists, activists, reporters and truth tellers—are not interested in being bought by anyone. Julie Hajducky spent 2020 and 2021 in the streets calling for greater police accountability and more funding for public education. Shakshi Patel saved a high school prom during Covid and was her high school’s valedictorian.
Luke Izzo helped people navigate the vaccine rollout in 2021. Reem Saood has spent the past four years advocating for human rights before graduating high school. Abiba Biao still tells the stories of New Haveners each week, as a reporter in these pages and in the New Haven Independent. Many are also participants in Kim Weston’s Focus Fellowship, which has allowed them to flex their visual muscles beyond the program.
They have the eyes (and also ears, hearts and minds) to paint a picture of New Haven that is true to their experiences, their present, their city. Many of the images are drenched in personality and chutzpah, including a mosaic of creative self-portraits in the center’s basement. Others exude a sense of ownership: that this is not the crime-ridden city that Yale sometimes makes it out to be, but a complicated and vibrant place that is also home.
At an opening reception earlier this month, students trickled through the building, some shoulder-to-shoulder as others fanned out, taking their time with their peers’ work. Walking through the space with Biao, Hajducky posed by her 2021 photograph “From Here,” taken during an inaugural cohort that was entirely online.
Printed in greyscale, the image shows her sister on a nondescript stretch of sidewalk, her face sun-dappled despite a sheet of dark sky above. A webbed black fence has turned it into a compositional study: the fence extends toward the sky, obscuring some of the buildings in the background. Her subject seems both tired and game for whatever is to come next.
“It [the program] helped me in reflecting on how to capture community and integrate photography into organizing and equity work,” Hajducky said.
As it comes to the Schwarzman Center, it also shows how photography (and film, which some of the students have expressed interest in) has evolved into a more democratic medium, transforming who and how and with what people get to tell these stories. This year, students focused on cell phone photography, using the devices in their hands to capture the city around them.
Paul Messier, the director of the Lens Media Lab, noted the importance and joy of watching the photography process change in real time. For him, the program is an exercise in belonging, set in a place that does not immediately invite it. Over three cohorts, he too has seen “that I actually belong here,” he said at an opening reception earlier this month. “That’s the message for everyone.”
“It connects you to the history and the future of the medium,” he added of the exhibition. Across cohorts, “You could see, just, worlds opening up.”
“The View from Here: Accessing Art Through Photography” runs through Nov. 22. at the Yale Schwarzman Center; see all of the work online here. The building is currently not accessible without a university ID. Visits can be arranged by emailing ysc.info@yale.edu.