Nat Geo photographer brings exhibit to Ybor City
Photographer Kristen Joy Emack’s Wellington neighborhood in Cambridge is changing right before her eyes.
“I didn’t realize what was happening to my community until buildings were beginning to be stacked around me,” she said, sitting in the living room of her family’s apartment. She nodded a few blocks away, toward Cambridge Street.
“That whole view has changed. That was an open view. And now you see tall buildings.”
Emack’s exhibition at Gallery Kayafas, “Book of Saints,” documents her community — one she sees as at risk.
“The city is really not sustainable,” she said. “For many, many families.”
Cambridge Community Foundation’s 2021 Equity & Innovation Cities: The Case of Cambridge report documents effects of the rise of the city’s innovation economy before the pandemic, with some data about COVID-19’s impact in 2020. Emack has photos in the report.
The study, building on 2019 Brookings Institution research, surveyed 25 cities nationwide with tech-powered economies
“Family households declined and were replaced by the millennial population, a population with more income, and less connected with geographic communities,” CCF president Geeta Pradhan told the Globe.
Fifty-six percent of Cantabrigians in the lowest economic bracket, or quintile, pay 50 percent or more of their income for housing, according to the report. “With an average income of $13,280, households in the first quintile earn nearly $330,000 less than households in the top quintile,” it states. Black homeowners and renters are the “most cost-burdened,”spending more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing.
“The stresses of gentrification or growth Cambridge was facing were much greater,” than the other cities, said Pradhan.
Emack said she lives in federally subsidized Section 8 housing. It’s where she raised her two children, Niko, 28, and Apple, 16.
“I have a lot of skin in the game,” she said.
For “Book of Saints,” she took portraits of ordinary people who make a community, even when the tide is against them: Manny, whom she met at a Black Lives Matter gathering after George Floyd’s murder; an undocumented friend Emack photographed with her back to the camera (titled with a pseudonym); best friends Clara and Rafa, whom Emack photographed separately in 2021 in front of a tree and a building.
The tree, the photographer said, “is now pulled up, unrooted and discarded. This building has been gutted.”
Rafa died last August of liver cancer, at 16. Emack said she wants to write about the medical racism she saw Rafa encounter before she received a proper diagnosis.
“Book of Saints” follows Emack’s series “Cousins,” published in November by L’artiere, featuring images of her daughter and three nieces. Emack is white; her daughter, Apple, is mixed race, and her nieces are Black. The series depicts the close bond among the four girls.
“There is a marketed style of commercial photography of Black girls,” Emack said, “and they don’t relate to that.”
“I knew and they knew that we were creating imagery that wasn’t out there in the world,” the photographer said.
“The trope about girls is that they start out innocent and as they get closer to the teenage years, they care less about the grown-ups in their life, they care less about each other, they care more about dating, and they are distracted by phones and beauty and et cetera,” Emack said. “That’s not what happened with their relationship.”
The project was in many ways a collaboration between artist and subjects.
“The subject is the girls, but sometimes the exploration is Kristen’s and sometimes it’s theirs,” said independent photography curator, educator, and podcaster J. Sybylla Smith, who lives in Cambridge.
“‘Cousins’ expands a narrative about coming of age and girlhood into young women of color becoming themselves,” she added.
The project lasted for 13 years. In 2021, they prepared to wrap it up.
“When I talked with my oldest niece about it, she got really sad and said, ‘I feel like if the work ends, then I end, too,’” said Emack.
Both Pradhan and Smith used the word “soulful” when describing Emack’s portraits.
“I think I spent a huge part of my early life not feeling seen,” said Emack, who grew up in Madison, Conn.. “So it’s valuable to me to help people feel seen. And I do it with my camera.”
The success of “Cousins” led the artist to a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped fund “Book of Saints.” Emack also works as family liaison for the Cambridge Public Schools, helping with resources.
“I sent out a reminder for families that if they wanted to apply for fuel assistance in the city of Cambridge, here’s the link and here’s how they do it,” she said.
But then someone emailed who was helping a refugee family “from a tradition of oral language, not written language,” Emack said. For a family that doesn’t read, clicking a link wasn’t so simple.
“That’s the hidden reality of being someone who’s under the poverty level in a place like Cambridge,” Emack said. “The resources people think come easily to lower-income families are really complex to get. They help, but they don’t solve the problem.”
She believes gentrification is changing her community in other ways.
“Cambridge is always recognized as a very progressive city, a liberal city. But the social-justice model that Cambridge has embraced for such a long time, that’s starting to shift,” she said. “It’s going to slip out of our fingers eventually, I think.”
“Book of Saints” captures her city now, “so that 100 years from now, 50 years from now, 20 years from now, when Cambridge has morphed into whatever it’s going to become,” Emack said, “we will have an archive of who was here, and who most likely was not able to stay.”
KRISTEN JOY EMACK: Book of Saints
At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave., through Feb. 10. 617-482-0411, www.gallerykayafas.com/book-of-saints
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.
