Carlos Javier Ortiz’ ‘We All We Got’ in Bronx Documentary Center, until March 22, 2015.
About Ortiz:
Carlos Javier Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, his love of photography led him to work at a traveling carnival to save money for photography equipment and college tuition. He studied photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago and became a staff photographer for Chicago In The Year 2000 (CITY 2000), a yearlong project documenting the city and its inhabitants. Since that time, Carlos Javier has focused on documenting society’s most vulnerable communities across the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel and West Bank. As a result of his commitment to addressing social problems, Carlos Javier won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography(2009) award for Too Young To Die, his multiyear, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America.
About the project:
“Siretha White was celebrating her 11th birthday when a stray bullet ripped through the front window of her aunt’s Chicago home, striking the young girl in the head and killing her almost instantly. Eight days earlier, and only a few blocks away, a stray bullet fired from an AK-47 had pierced a basement window and killed 14-year-old Starkeisha Reed. Her family was planning to move out of the house in a few days.
This pair of tragic murders motivated Carlos Javier Ortiz to begin his eight-year documentary project looking at impact of gun violence. By embedding himself with a few families affected by random acts of violence, Ortiz captured powerful images that examine the repercussions of a split-second of brutality. The images are challenging, but also catch moments of the incredible strength of those who are left behind.
During the eight years Ortiz worked on the story he says more than 1,500 young people in Chicago were killed.”
(quotes from interview of Jeanette D. Moses in American Photo, January 23, 2015).
