Next Door: Environmental Injustice in Our Neighborhoods

About

The exhibit at the Los Angeles Center for Photography is the culmination of work by Los Angeles-area high school students and professional visual storytellers. AfroLA, a nonprofit news outlet covering L.A. through the lens of the Black community, partnered with Black Women Photographers to produce an immersive art exhibition focused on the intersection of environmental and racial justice.

Pairs of BWP photographers and Da Vinci Communications High School’s multimedia journalism students interviewed residents from predominantly Black and Latine communities, including Inglewood, Leimert Park and Wilmington. They also spoke with community advocates, researchers and experts whose work centers mitigating environmental harms, past and present.

The interviews were produced as “mini-podcasts” by the students that will be accessible at the exhibit via QR codes displayed alongside the artwork. What is it like to live near warehouses that reroute industrial traffic through your neighborhood? What adjustments do residents have to make to deal with contaminated water or poor air quality that results in chronic illness? What’s it like to live next door to an oil field? Attendees will be able to see and hear how residents—especially those in historically-marginalized communities—live day to day.

The Curator

Tara Pixley, Ph.D. is a queer, Jamaican-American photographer, filmmaker, and professor based in Los Angeles. Her photography and films reimagine race, gender, climate futures, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens. Her work as a photojournalist has taken her from the ships of eco-pirates to the U.S. presidential campaign trail and her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Allure, People, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, and ESPN, among many others. She has been named a Reynolds Journalism Fellow, Pulitzer Center Grantee, World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism grantee and a Knight Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. Tara is on the Boards of the National Press Photographers Association and Stocksy. She is a co-Founder and current Director of Authority Collective — an organization dedicated to establishing equity for women of color in visual media — and she is currently photographing the environmental justice crisis of Southern California oil production.