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I made this photograph of U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock for a story about inversions and the regulations that could protect public health in the Mon Valley.
It was early one morning in late January, when cool air often traps warmer emissions at street level. I walked beneath the plumes flowing north in the air above me, and I camped out on the hillside across from the mill, waiting for the moment when you could just make out its silhouette.
It’s become one of my favorite images. The Caprice and the smokestacks are anachronisms. They remind me of stories that my grandfather told about life along the Mon in the 1940s when his white shirts turned black on the way home from school and his mother’s sheets soiled on the clothesline in the afternoon smog. But this image was made today: It’s a reminder of the tight grip of our region’s industrial legacy.
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How do you photograph a group of people who never wanted to be connected?
“I like to say: It’s a community I love dearly, but it’s one that I’m never happy to see other people join,” Pitt student Eva Steele told PublicSource reporter Emma Folts. Her once-reluctant embrace of a group of people joining together through the shared trauma of sexual and gender-based violence resonated with me. It was almost two decades earlier that I myself joined the ranks of people we were now reporting on for our Red Zone investigation — when I made my first front page not as a photojournalist, but as a survivor of a sexual assault while at university.
That reverence for the circle I unwillingly joined as a college freshman led me to create a series of conceptual portraits of survivors that was connected by the visual repetition of circular mirrors. The mirrors connected the participants to each other and reflected their experiences into a larger community of people who are moving from the isolating experience of sexual violence into healing. Sometimes, the mirrors are used to craft visual metaphors for the physical experiences that survivors shared, such as dissociation with the body and periods of memory loss. The mirrors also allowed survivors to participate at the level of identification they were comfortable with, sometimes obscuring identity and reflecting other aspects of their story.
Eva’s time connecting other survivors of intimate partner violence to support one another and advocate for systemic change had earned her a seat at the table with Pitt’s Title IX office, where she brought the perspectives of survivors to policy discussions through her Project Healing Sideways. Our portrait session stretched into hours as we talked through concepts, her experiences, what she had learned and how to communicate the calm power she now held. A friend and fellow Pitt student patiently helped as we tilted mirrors this way and that to get the reflections lined up just right in the shade of a tree. At the moment above, the wind blew Eva’s hair, I pressed the shutter, and we collaborated to freeze that feeling of a community holding each other as they try to find peace.
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