Public Story
Mediating Meaning
The individual city New York City resident inhabits the daily experience of having to negotiate meaning out of the competing street level elements to efficiently navigate their world. Their everyday life is consistently caught between diverging and converging agendas. The repetitive nature of the presentation of the images in this project aims to convey how routine it can become to mediate and unravel this meaning as a part of the city's massive shift in identity, achieved primarily through rezoning and development, and often met with increased battle over reclamation of space, power, and self-agency.
Mediating Meaning reflects this negotiation through the visual representation of Bloomberg era policy manifestiations. It is an ongoing body of work that takes its cues from Eugene Atget's19th century study of Paris streets in the wake of massive planning changes in the city in the 1860s, and Zoe Leonard's decade long look at Manhattan's Lower East Side as businesses of the 20th century collapsed and closed, creating a new visual landscape.Mediating Meaning won 2nd place at the International Visual Sociology Association's poster presentation during the annual conference in 2017.
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