Brooklyn, N.Y. A picture speaks a thousand words. An adage we have all heard too many times to count but understood the meaning of with our first picture taken or with every moment we look at an old photo and recall the emotions we felt when it was taken. It is in these moments we see people alive, truly existing in time. This is what photographer and artist Caroll Taveras is looking to capture with her continued Global Family Album project that she started back in 2009 in a small neighborhood of Brooklyn.
2009 Photo Studio Project, Brooklyn New York.
Carroll has been an artistic photographer for a number of years gaining notice in the New York Times, Time Magazine and a host of other media as well as holding a few exhibitions showcasing her work. If you ask her how she would classify her photography she will tell you she is a portraiture photographer, capturer of the moment, but her work expands beyond portraits. She has traveled to many parts of the world, not just capturing people, sitting and living life as it is happening, but of disasters, pain, and all the emotions that life inundates us with. Her pictures draw out the emotions of both the person photographed and the one admiring it.
Caroll Taveras in her 2009 Photo Studio project in Brooklyn.
There is more to what she is trying to create though. Yes, at a glance she is bringing to the table a great project of photography that will portray images of people and the times they live in from around the world but there is something more to what she is trying to do. Back in 2009 she opened the Caroll Taveras Photo Studio on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn as a photo project to bring out the people of the neighborhood, but she wasn’t starting something new.
Photo Studios had at one time been a staple in neighborhoods of all different types of classes and ethnicities, providing a quick and often communal way for people, families, and friends to capture a picture together while sharing community information and memories. You can only imagine what culture, what time, what moments were captured and frozen in the pictures when these studios were popular, but with the explosion of instant photos and easy and quick development, photo studios began to disappear from the neighborhood, replaced by drug stores, corner stores, and “space for rent” signs.
Caroll isn’t continuing her work here though. Instead she will be taking it across the ocean to Hackney, London to pick up where she left off here in the U.S. in a mixed community similar to Brooklyn, with the hopes of bringing back the memory of the photo studio and reintroducing the community to the magic of portrait photography. From there she hopes to travel around doing this amazing project, bringing the world closer to itself and showing people all over that we truly are one family. To learn more about Caroll Taveras and her project, click on the links below.
I’m interested in what people are looking like right now. What they’re wearing, what their hair is like, what their expression is like. Because there’s something about a time period that you can even see it on people’s faces. – Caroll Taveras
Photographer and artist Caroll Taveras.
