Project Lives ─ New York Public Housing Residents Photograph Their World

For a generation now, the tabloids and Hollywood have helped create an appalling public image of New Yorkers who live in the city's 334 public housing projects. Focusing on crime, disrepair and other ills that plague these islands of red brick, such portrayals have tarred perpetrator and victim alike, ironically making it all too easy for federal and local government in turn to reduce the subsidies the projects have relied on since their birth eighty years ago -- worsening conditions further yet, as the buildings try to soldier on past their intended life, at times crumbling around the 400,000 tenants.

What if the project residents had the tools and training to document their own lives? And the opportunity to share the result? Project Lives takes you on a remarkable journey into a New York City turned inside out, where the camera's subject becomes the storyteller. Participatory photography, of which this marks one of the largest efforts anywhere, comes the closest to creating a new visual medium, a universal language speaking across borders and cultures.

By using their cameras to show us a world worth preserving, not to say improving, the courageous souls who set out on a daunting mission to change how Americans see, and therefore support them may accomplish more than helping preserve their homes.

A Bronx native, George Carrano founded the non-profit Seeing for Ourselves, which brought the Developing Lives photography program to New York's housing authority in 2010. He has also curated exhibits of war photojournalism and participatory photography that The New York Times termed "poignant" and "not to be missed." Earlier, George raised the bar for public transit at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, inventing passenger displays that became the industry standard; leading the agency to just-in-time logistics; and implementing MetroCard -- this last a $2 billion subway token replacement whose success awed New York and has remained one of the largest public work projects in US transportation history, universally judged a city milestone.

A born Brooklynite with family roots in New York public housing, photographer and teacherChelsea Davis helped create and now directs the Developing Lives photography program at the New York City Housing Authority. She had earlier created a participatory art class for the city's Association for Metro-Area Autistic Children (2004). Building on its success, Chelsea established the Project Picasso program three years later in the pediatric oncology ward of St. Louis Children's Hospital, providing art therapy to young children struggling with cancer. The program continues to operate, including a focus on photography that captures each child's personality without illness overwhelming the portrait.

Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx and Queens, Jonathan Fisher administers the Developing Lives photography program at the New York City Housing Authority, managing its extension into award-winning video. Trained in transportation science, he had made his mark at the city's transit agency by producing products likewise award-winning that delighted millions of passengers. Jonathan also handled technology communications within Madison Avenue's Ogilvy & Mather, communicating best practices to 10,000 advertising practitioners in 104 countries. Meanwhile, he has produced highly regarded web, video and collateral for Agent Orange relief.