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F.ecently Rosey and I heard acclaimed photojournalist Eli Reed discuss his work. Rosey works on a project devoted to documenting grassroots community efforts at twelve sites in the united States through oral histories and photography. Reed was one of the photographers who worked on the project" After expending two and half carousels' worth of slides accompanied by unsteady narration to the almost entirely white audience, Reed concluded the evening with a very safe Q&A session consisting of mostly technical exchanges and only a few general questions which Reed chose to skirt, leaving us both very disappointed and a little angry. F.eed, himself an African-American, published a book in '97 *ntitled "Black in America", a photographic exploration dating from the '70's to the present. The bulk of the images he showed were from this lengthy project and depicted "everyday" scenes interspersed with portraits of celebrities like Bill Cosby, Tyra Banks, and John Singleton, along with headline events such as Yusef Hawkins'funeral and the riots in Crown Heights, followed soon after by a picture of Al Sharpton. ln discordant conjunction were photographs he tooh I suppose, in Malawi at camps for Rwandans fleeing the genocide. The images disconcerted because of their unexplained inclusion amid a body of work shot entirely with an American subject which implied a self-evident connection between African and American experiences. Further, there was an unchallenged authority in Reed's and the audience's monopoly in creating "American" images and the associated narrative made more acute by a lack of self-reflection on Reed's part. The pictures featured mostly clrildren in the various postures of African despair and injury, irnnges of a type made nearly banal through their relentless use hy relief agencies. Reed gave little explanation of the scenes, paasing over them as the audience sighed in collective sympathy at the well-composed depictions of pathos. There was something disconcerting in the unremarked fashion in v*rlch these images were nestled in against slides of impoverished kids in Harlem, victims of school violence at
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