The Town

Private Story

The Town - COVID-19

Copyright Ben Cleeton 2024

Date of Work Apr 2020 - Ongoing

Updated Jun 2021

Topics Birth, Civil Rights, Community, Documentary, Dying/Death, Family, Pandemics, Photography, Racism

“The Town” is a personal project which focuses on my hometown of Syracuse—Central New York’s rust-belt anchor. When COVID-19 shut the world down, leading to the abrupt cancellation of contracted work, I harnessed the idleness and stillness wrought by the pandemic by returning to the original intentions that fueled my passion. Taking advantage of the limitation imposed on movement, I remained in Syracuse. This occasioned revisiting “The Town,” my senior photography capstone at Syracuse University in 2014. Over the past year, this project has evolved and blossomed into different mediums. In its current iteration, it includes a book, documentary, and a series of short film collaborations, illuminating voices of The Town. The accompanying images captured during the pandemic recognize the moments of care, solidarity, and resilience forged in the face of uncertainty.

In March 2020, the pandemic caused bars and clubs across New York State to shut down. Syracuse ground to a halt. The Town, however, kept moving. There, house parties replaced bars and clubs. With the passage of winter and the onset of summer, these events moved outdoors and to the streets—car stereos booming music and the endless display of elaborate fireworks illuminating the celebrations below. Among these were late-night summertime block parties, exquisite baby showers and birthday parties celebrating new life, and vigils and funerals.

“When you from the Town, it’s a Town thing,” said André “Ralow” Wilson, a neighborhood griot who first heard of “The Town” while incarcerated in NYS. “I think it started in prison and ended out in the street and it just stayed in the street,” he said. “Even though Syracuse is small it’s still big enough that everybody don’t know everybody, so when you see an individual that you never see before that look familiar you be like, ‘You from the town?’ If they from Syracuse they gonna be like, ‘Yo, I’m from the Town.’”
In local and national media, Syracuse is often known for the high rate of concentrated poverty among Blacks and Hispanics1 and the decline of neighborhood shops, supermarkets, and historic residences resulting from decades of redlining, gentrification, incarceration, and job loss. Systematic racist policy paved the way for blight. In 2017, Syracuse’s poverty rate (32.4%) tied for ninth in the nation with Bloomington, Indiana and Dearborn, Michigan.2

Commonplace images of underprivileged neighborhoods focus on crime, poverty, and violence, failing to recognize the unquantifiable human dimensions of care and solidarity abundant in Syracuse. This project attempts to capture the sacred everyday lives of people from The Town. These vibrant pockets of community, arguably, represents the invisible Syracuse not seen by outsiders. My art is nothing without them. I hope that these stories offer a counter-narrative to a one-dimensional portrayal of a once thriving city now on the margins.

1Weiner, Mark. “Syracuse has nation’s highest poverty concentrated among blacks, Hispanics.” Syracuse.com, September 6, 2015.

2Breidenbach, Michelle. “Syracuse makes list no one wants to be on: Top 10 U.S. cities with highest poverty.” Syracuse.com, September 13, 2018.