The Street as School: The Photography of Alice Smeets

“Ghetto” is at once a delicate and strong word. To mention it is to walk around eggshells, to conjure up images—rightly or wrongly, depending on who we are talking to—of ramshackle houses and rough-and-tumble conditions. For those who haven’t been in one or had the serious occasion to think about it, “ghetto” will be a confounding term.

UNICEF-awarded photographer Alice Smeets knew enough about the misconceptions; she grew up far from where she could actually see one. But this did not stop her from trying to understand poverty. At 19, she flew to Haiti, miles away (in culture as in distance) from her hometown of Belgium. Here she learned that poverty is not to be romanticized. It is complex and structural. And yet a caveat: Even in poverty some people strive to live the most dignified way they know how. Some of them can even create art out of rubble.

Smeets has been doing documentary projects in Haiti for seven years before creating the 2014 series Ghetto Tarot, a found-art spin on photojournalism. Together with Atis Rezistans, she reimagined Pamela Colman Smith’s tarot cards from the early 1900s. Instead of shooting in lush environments, Smeets chose areas of Port-au-Prince where the occult cards can excite contradictions and similarities. 

Early this month, she talked to Lomography about the distinctive project and the years leading up to it.

Comic Con’s Latino neighbors were fed up with being left out — so they created Chicano-Con 

After years of simply playing host to the fast-growing comic convention, residents of San Diego’s historically Latino neighborhood Barrio Logan decided it was time to come up with heroes of their own.

Ferguson: One Year Later

Adrees Latif revisits the sites where he documented the social unrest in the months following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown one year ago.

Pictures: Adrees Latif / Reuters

Edward Hopper

Oil on Canvas

Ferguson now has America’s most powerful street art 

Damon Davis spent Thursday zigzagging across West Florissant Avenue, a paint roller in one hand and a bundle of posters under his arm.

His idea was simple: Since last summer, the quiet suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, had been through such radical upheaval it no longer resembled itself. It needed to be reclaimed.