Press

ALBANY, NY – On Saturday, June 2 a new exhibition --“unseenamerica NYS: pictures of working lives taken by working hands”-- opens at the New York State Museum, featuring photographs taken by workers from across New York State.

To celebrate the opening, several of the photographers will be on hand June 2 at 2 p.m. for a gallery talk in Exhibition Hall. Also, Jeremy Dudley (Aka Origin), an Albany elementary school English teacher who does hip-hop, will present a program geared toward young people. Due to the Freihofer’s Run for Women on June 2, Madison Avenue and the parking lots on either side of the Museum will be closed. Parking will be available for $2 in the East Parking Garage and in the Empire State Plaza’s visitors’ lot (P-2N).

On Thursday, June 14, a reception for the exhibition, free and open to the public, will be held at the State Museum from 6 – 8 p.m.

The exhibition’s 65 photographs, on display through October 21, were shot by participants in the unseenamerica New York State project, funded by the Workforce Development Institute (WDI); a collaboration with the NYS AFL-CIO, and the Bread and Roses cultural arm of Service Employees International Union Local 1199.

The core of the project is a 12-week workshop where workers from around the state — including janitors, bus drivers, construction and hospital workers, recent immigrants and scores of others — are taught the basic principles of documentary photography and creative writing. These tools allow unseen workers to document their own experiences, describe their worlds and, ultimately, to gain visibility and dignity. Each workshop culminates in a local exhibition of photographs, accompanied by text written by the participants, resulting in a moving and sometimes surprising portrait of New York State from the workers’ perspective.

While unseenamerica is a nationwide program, the exhibition at the State Museum consists of images made solely in New York at recent workshops in Long Island, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and
Buffalo among other places. Since WDI started, the New York state program in Albany in 2004 over 20
projects have been completed. After its run at the State Museum the exhibition will travel throughout New York.

The photographs in the exhibition appear on banners with quotes from the photographers. All
exhibition text is also in Spanish. Seven of the photographs in the exhibition also appear in a book,“Unseenamerica: Photo and Stories by Workers,” a collection of black and white photographs taken by working-class Americans across the country.

Esther Cohen, executive director of Bread and Roses, developed the unseenamerica project five years ago to provide an artistic outlet for community members who have no public voice and little
visibility in the larger culture. “Unseenamerica began by accident, really,” she says. “A volunteer in our office brought in 100 donated cameras, and we used those to devise a program, using images and text, to help people tell whatever stories they wanted about their lives.”

Zoeann Murphy is the Workforce Development Institute’s coordinator of the program unseenamerica New York State. “Unseenamerica is an exercise in democracy,” she says. “Workers, immigrants and refugees are creating their own media, and we are integrating these voices into the larger social and cultural fabric of the nation. It has been an incredible privilege to hear the stories people tell in classes and work with participants to depict their lives through photography.”

The New York State Museum is a cultural program of the New York State Education Department. Started in 1836, the Museum has the longest continuously operating state natural history research and collection survey in the United States. Located on Madison Avenue in Albany, it is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. Admission is free. Further information about programs and events can be obtained by calling (518) 474-5877 or visiting the museum website at www.nysm.nysed.gov.

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