Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Friday, December 21, 2007
Trevor Carpenter has tossed out his 2008 Challenge - document your community. The challenge is to shoot one image a week.
I'll give it a shot, if you'll pardon the pun.
Over at the Zooomr Zipline Trevor has asked for a definition of "community," noting that it means different things to different people. So here ya go.
"Community" can indeed mean different things. We are all members of several communities - our workplace, school, place of worship, neighborhood are all separate communities. Some may overlap, and the amount of overlap is different for each of us. No, I will NOT make out a Venn diagram. (grin)
I decided to define the communities I feel part of. Job? Well, I freelance. It's just me. Gads, you wouldn't want to see another photo of my desk every week. The mess alone might drive otherwise sane people mad.
I suppose there's the fandom community. It's a large group of people, and within fandom there are many smaller communities (aieeeee!). To document that would mean attending one convention a week, and I don't have the resources to do that.
That leaves the place where I live to be the best option. Again, it's a matter of defining community. There's the entire city, but to me a "community" is something that I belong to. Yes, I'm a citizen of Plano, but no, I don't belong in the million-plus dollar mansions on the far west side of town. I live on the east side of town, a diverse, interesting area. ("How diverse is it?" Well I'll tell you!) Economically, my little neighborhood (as defined by the elementary school attendance zone) goes from tiny houses and apartments crammed full of immigrants to large houses built along a creek, and everything in between. Two miles down the road is a horse farm. Downtown is on the east side. Between here and downtown is an early, historically significant area of postwar housing. We have the Douglass area that was founded as a Freedman's town and has managed to keep its identity for all these years. I mentioned the elementary school? It's being replaced. Version 2.0 is going up on the same lot as the building that opened in the early 1960s.
When people think of Plano, TX, they tend to think of rich folks and drugs. Yes, that was the father of a Plano child on the cover of Newsweek a year ago. The young man took steroids so he could compete on the football team and ended up killing himself. That's the dark side of our city. We have gangs here, too. Yet, I love it here on the east side. We have trees, we don't have zero lot line homes (like the other side of town), and we have neighbors that talk to each other - usually.
I suppose that's what I'll attempt to document. It should be interesting.
Tags: 2008 Challenge