Downloads: Press Release
June 29, 2017 — New York, N.Y. — POV and The New York Times embedded mediamaker project reached its final triumphant milestone this week as the piece “6 Years and Desegregating a School” by Bayeté Ross Smith and Logan Jaffe published in the Times today.
Beginning in 2016, POV partnered with The New York Times on the project, in which three filmmakers fluent in digital media spent several months working at The Times, creating interactive video projects about race and ethnicity. The work was co-produced by senior editorial staff at POV and The Times‘ video and national desks and its Race/Related newsletter. The mutual goal was to produce bold, challenging projects about race that neither The Times nor POV would create on their own, and, for POV, to explore new avenues of digital distribution.
About the Mediamakers:
Bayeté Ross Smith is a photographer, multimedia artist and filmmaker from Harlem, N.Y. He began his career as a photojournalist with Knight Ridder. Ross Smith has exhibited his work internationally with institutions such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Brooklyn Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Schomburg Center, the Unseen Photo Festival (Amsterdam), Goethe-Institut (Ghana) and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative projects “Along The Way” and “Question Bridge: Black Males” were showcased at the Sundance Film Festival among other festivals. His accolades include an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for New Media. Ross Smith is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and New York University and associate program director of the nonprofit Kings Against Violence Initiative. Follow Bayeté Ross Smith on Twitter and Instagram @BayeteKenan.
Logan Jaffe was the multimedia producer of WBEZ’s Curious City, a news-gathering experiment that answers listeners’ questions about the Chicago region. She is the producer of Battle Flag, an interactive documentary about the Confederate flag’s place in America, which was featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian and The Washington Post. Following her time as a mediamaker, Logan joined The Times as a producer/journalist on their 360 video team. Follow Logan Jaffe on Twitter @loganjaffe.
Saleem Reshamwala is a video producer based in Durham, N.C., whose work has focused on culture, race and music. Reshamwala has created work for LinkedIn, Soccer.com and PBS Digital Studios, for which he filmed rappers and beatmakers in Senegal, Ethiopia, Fiji, Panama and the Democratic Republic of Congo (for the web series “Beat Making Lab”). He also had “an incredibly weird” two-year stint as an art assistant at Seventeen Magazine. Reshamwala has studied, worked or hung out in 50 countries and is fluent in English, Japanese and Final Cut. He has degrees in journalism and philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow Saleem Reshamwala on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat @kidethnic.
About the projects
Confronting Racist Objects: A Painful Past Still Present
Racist objects remain pervasive in America today – so how can we use them to face our past? POV embedded mediamaker Logan Jaffe, working in collaboration with The New York Times’ Race/Related team, received hundreds of stories from everyday Americans about reconciling, reclaiming and reinterpreting racist objects. Watch video and read some of their stories.
This election year has often felt like one enormous swarm of poll numbers, vote forecasts and nonstop statistical analysis. All this number crunching led POV Mediamaker Saleem Reshamwala and The New York Times’ Giovanni Russonello to wonder what might be missed when we try to describe entire groups as being uniformly for or against a presidential candidate.
Our subconscious brain makes all sort of quick – and not always fair – decisions about everything, including race. Saleem Reshamwala, one of POV’s mediamakers embedded at The New York Times, looks at research into implicit bias and tangible ways we can improve.
The filmmaker and artist Bayeté Ross Smith asked nine different Americans of varied backgrounds questions about when they have felt most and least American. You can see their answers in Hyphen-Nation, a video, art and interactive project – and you can also participate.
Earlier this year Bayeté Ross Smith, one of POV’s mediamakers working on a collaboration with the New York Times’ Race/Related team, launched a project to collect images of a diverse America. Hundreds of people contributed vibrant photos and stories about their lives, and a selection of those have now been published at The Times.
For the past few months, three POV mediamakers have been embedded at The New York Times working on projects about race and ethnicity. Along the way, they asked each other a bunch of awkward questions about race and answered those questions on Instagram. Dive into the entire conversation.
Daily 360: Firsthand Account: The Assassination of Malcolm X
The civil rights leader Malcolm X was killed Feb. 21, 1965, at a rally in New York City. In this project by Bayeté Ross Smith, we hear from a witness, A. Peter Bailey, and visit the site of the assassination — in the past, present, and in 360 video.
