VCPGH | The Fall 2021 Gathering

Excited to help host the Rust Belt & Appalachia Documentary Film Festival this Saturday, November 6th, 6-9 PM at Carrie Furnace, part of our push to grow both connection our film community and a Pittsburgh chapter of Video Consortium. Come join us, eat, drink, socialize, and see work from the region all in the backdrop of one of my favorite places in the region, Carrie Furnace in Rankin. With work from Curren Sheldon & 100 Days in Appalachia, Carmen Gentile & Postindustrial, Mallory Brangan & Juliette Rihl, Amanda Page & David Bernabo, Lauren Elise Santucci, Christiana Botic, Daymon Long, David Zucker & Luke Terrrell, and a premiere from Braddock legend Tony Buba.

This one-night event hosted by The Video Consortium’s Pittsburgh chapter will screen selected short documentaries from Pittsburgh and the surrounding Rust Belt and Appalachian regions. There will be plenty of food, drinks, music, and some downtime to hang out with friends and colleagues. Come early to make new connections and demo some of the newest professional camera gear, like the Sony Fx9 and Canon C500, brought to you by our equipment sponsor, Resolution Rentals. Hope to see you there!

I still can’t find the words to express the whirlwind of feelings after hearing that Coverings, our investigation of child sexual abuse and cover-ups in the insular Amish and Mennonite communities, was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s my sincere hope that the survivors who took a risk in sharing their most vulnerable stories with us in hopes of building safer, more healing communities for new generations feel their voices amplified in this moment. We hear change is happening for the better, and I couldn’t think of a better honor than that.

Reporting like this is not born in a vacuum, it’s mopped from the brows of a team of people who believe in the hard work of stories that are hard to report. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to learn from Peter Smith and Shelly Bradbury, whose humble excellence in the craft of reporting carries beyond the page and into the sinews of who they are. Editors Rebecca Droke and Lillian Thomas understood the importance of time, patience, and gentle guidance as we continued to bring back new pieces of a complex puzzle to connect together. My fellow photo staff picked up other assignments so I could be on the road or editing. Designers Zack Tanner and Alex Miller built impactful, clean presentations from the pile of text, video, and photos we’d built throughout the months.

Even further behind-the-scenes are each of our at-home support systems. My family supported me from afar with love and patience I can’t possibly deserve (even while worrying about me and probably not understanding entirely what I was doing). My partner Justin Merriman never questioned the importance of spending time away to work on this, even through my all-nighters of video editing I pulled on our long-awaited vacation at the beach. He gets why it’s important on a broader level, and I can’t imagine this past year without his loyalty and understanding. A tip of my hat to the motel vending machines I frequented as I backed up and organized files after long days of interviews. And to my grandad, a newspaper man through and through, who always told me I would see my name on the Pulitzer list (and who I always thought was just being a sweet grandad by saying that)– I hope you can see this wherever you are.

What a rugged emotional landscape this past year was, inside and outside the newsroom walls. Our newsroom receiving the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting feels confusing, an oscillation between wanting to laugh and cry (and barf?). Recognitions like this don’t take way the pain behind what happened, but hopefully honor it, and acknowledge what we can do together pushing in the same direction. “We are not so much celebrating as affirming … the job we were put on this earth to do,” said David Shribman, our former executive editor. “Let’s dedicate ourselves to the memory of those whose lives were lost.” And now, back to work.

Top photo: Michelle Kenney looks out of the Allegheny County Courthouse window before the start of the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld, charged in the fatal shooting of her son, 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. “As a mom, you can’t prepare for this — you just have to do it — there is no go-to map on this,” Ms. Kenney said. “I’ll treat it as any other role that I have as Antwon’s mother. I just have to do it.”

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“We will continue to reach out to the community, to call on the community to come together,” said 1Hood activist/musician Jasiri X during a vigil in Rankin to honor Antwon. People gathered on the basketball court in Hawkins Village where Antwon once played, a painting of Antwon’s smiling face looking out above an altar of flowers and candles. Addressing Antwon’s family, Jasiri said, “We will not abandon you in this time… We are with you.”

The words came after a weekend of marches into businesses and through the streets in dark, rain, and shine after the acquittal of former East Pittsburgh Police officer Michael Rosfeld in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Rose. The marches continued through the week, with hundreds of students walking out from school and into the rain to flood the streets of downtown Pittsburgh and chanting the name of Antown Rose II. Third grader Esme carried a painting she made of Antwon that read, “This is why we kneel. #JusticeforAntwon.” Across town at Woodland Hills High School, Antwon’s mother addressed his former high school classmates. “I got up there and said what I would have said to Antwon,” Ms. Kenney said. Don’t walk out of school in protest, she told them. Get an education and work to effect change. Vote. “Do what Antwon isn’t here to do.”

If you have suggestions on stories you want to see from your Western PA community, feel free to contact me to start a conversation.

“It might not happen with one image, it might take thousands of images layered in a consciousness - a national consciousness, and individual consciousness - to really move people forward, move people to action, but I do believe images have that power.” -Lynn Johnson says it best.

Join me at Robert Morris University, let’s talk photojournalism and storytelling!

Bella holds still as her mother dresses her for her first time as Atabey in a Taino Full Moon Ceremony in their neighborhood of Hazelwood. The ceremony marked the last full moon for the winter season and honors the monthly cycles of the earth, human women, and Atabey, or the cosmic matriarch in the Taino people’s tradition. Miguel Sague, a behike (or shaman) at Caney Indigenous Spiritual Circle, spoke of the way that the full moon pulls on the tide’s of the earth’s blood, or the oceans and water. “Human blood also does the same thing, at least in the body of women,” he said,  "All of us, including men, all benefit by this cycle of fertility.“

Bella’s mother, Dayvanna, held tears in her eyes as she watched her daughter take this right of passage. "I get to witness you and all the studies you’ve done to be able to embrace this moment for yourself.” She thanked the cosmic mother for another month of life and blew prayers in smoke to her ancestors.

I felt the weight of hundreds of years of colonization on my shoulders as I watched this beautiful moment unfold. I know the harsh history of photojournalism, white colonialism, and indigenous people, the conflict and misunderstanding caused by the lens of outsiders, pressing up against the understanding that there I was, in a small living room, witnessing something that this young woman had been anticipating her whole life. My head still swarmed with thoughts of the history of my whiteness crashing up against this beautiful, breathtaking, quiet acknowledgement of the infinite and divine, womanhood and moonhood, of a repeating line of mothers and daughters that goes back farther than I can understand.

Miguel must have sensed my struggle. He looked at me and told me that the Taino people had painted their ceremonies on cave walls, which read as accounts of those times, the revelations and traditions and manifestations that occurred. “You are one of those cave painters on those cave walls,” he told me. Dayvanna agreed.

I don’t know if they knew that this week, with what we’ve been dealing with in our newsroom, these words, this beautiful expression of forgiveness and understanding, would give me the strength and clarity of purpose I need to carry through. There’s still more work to do (okay, a lot of work to do), but I’ll never forget that moment.

A year after our original reporting published, Rich Lord and I traveled back to see how “OD Road” is changing, slowly, into Recovery Road. Here in Pittsburgh’s once most fatal ground for the epidemic, overdoses are dropping, and 1,050 “saves” have been made — almost all by other opioid users — using naloxone distributed by Prevention Point Pittsburgh since 2017.

I had to check that my mouth wasn’t hanging open while visiting Donna Williams. She had opened up from her “raw, get out of my neighborhood” approach to people in addiction to wanting to offer clean needles and health services on her block instead. She baked cookies for the men in the recovery house up the street, she is partnering with a man who formerly sold and used drugs to transform the minds of her neighbors.

Despite the cautious optimism, ripples of trauma are still carrying through families for generations. Here’s what people shared with us.

When we sat with Gary Fisher months before his own fatal OD, he foreshadowed the abandonment he would pass on from his own childhood to his daughter’s.

“Abandonment’s a big thing, it was a big thing for me. I was abandoned by one person that I didn’t think should ever abandon me. And I fear that for my daughter, that she’s going to wonder why dad left, why he’s not around, why he died. And she’s going to have questions and she’s never going to get answers. And that feeling that I live with on a daily basis, I don’t want anybody to go through. And I don’t want her to feel like I gave her up.”

We went back to Gary’s daughter’s house in McKeesport, Pa. as she struggles with the anxiety of the bullying and night terrors she is experiencing in the wake of her father’s death. Her story is part of the final chapter of Needle in the Family Tree, a yearlong look at how the opioid and overdose epidemic is impacting families in Western Pennsylvania. Head to the Post-Gazette here for more.

Pennsylvania road trip. More always, here.

The (dino) geese are back atop the 10th Street Bridge by Pittsburgh’s South Side. “There’s a real risk right now to the city losing the character and the history that it’s had and people are starting to be aware of that and don’t want to just wash everything off and turn it into a shiny new place again,” said Brandon Barber, who assisted longtime friend and fellow artist Tim Kaulen as they perched 100 ft. above the street to try to match up to the painted geese Tim painted on the bridge some 20 years prior.

I’ve gawked up at those paintings since I first moved to the city, wondering about them, about how they got there and what they meant (and thinking they were dinosaurs). 995 people who signed a petition to save the art have been wondering alongside me, creating their own stories and meaning for the four-foot-tall figures.

Tim says he loves that people have crafted their own meaning behind them. “I felt that my community needed a spark, a highlight, something to say: there’s something here, there’s a pulse here that’s important, and there’s a voice here.” From his seat at OTB Bicycle Cafe in the neighborhood where he came of age as an artist, Tim talks inspiration from his grandfather’s primitive, handmade decoys, why he took risk for art in the 1st place, and being mindful to stand against the erasure of culture, work, character, and history in the city as it goes through a period of rapid change.

Sound on for the video, and see/read more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.

Today on Overdose Awareness Day, a story of hope is building in Pittsburgh’s OD captiol of Carrick.

Self-described “recovering addict” and former drug dealer Gus DiRenna leads a prayer with a crew of people in recovery as they start work to turn a drug den in the neighborhood into a “Serenity House” for people working on their sobriety and starting a new chapter in their life. The process feeds into DiRenna’s simple formula: people in recovery need a decent room, a job and a community of support. “It just takes not talking at somebody, but reaching your hand out and helping them up, it gets them their hope,” said DiRenna. He opened up the home for a preview open house so that the community could see the transformation the space would make:

“He was facing cracked windows, crumbling plaster, a charred kitchen, a shower wall held together with tape … all the features you’d expect in a 117-year-old, five-bedroom house that ended up on the block watch’s list of drug hotspots. “See, when I look at this, I see opportunity, job training, kids making a little bit of money,” said Mr. DiRenna, recovery director of the ARK Allegheny Recovery Krew. “There’s going to be a lot of laughter and fun going on in here.”“

Read more here about the series of Serenity Houses DiRenna and his crew are building in their attempt to turn “OD Road” into “Recovery Road.”