A photo exhibit entitled ?Martin Luther King?s Dream Project? is now on display in the Frederick Douglass Institute. The exhibit, which is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. from now until Sunday, is a collection of twenty photographs that use King?s ?I Have a Dream? speech as a measure of how attitudes and actions have changed since the 1963 speech.
Individuals and local groups such as the Baden Street Settlement, the Urban League of Rochester and the South West Area Neighborhood Association took the photographs with the goal of capturing local impressions of the impact of the Civil Rights movement.
The participants took part in a workshop at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography where they viewed King?s speech and learned photo-taking techniques.
The photos, which are displayed unassumingly on a partition along the far wall of Morey 302, are an interesting mix of positive and negative imagery, and black-and-white and color photography.
within the Rochester community.
Another photo features a young black girl, with her Winnie the Pooh backpack laid to the side, waiting in line to be frisked on the way into school.
While it does not suggest that the girl is being singled out in any way since there were other ethnicities in line with her, it does display the barriers blacks have to face in their attempts to gain a good education.
The photographs do a good job of bringing the specter of discrimination close to home, and also to highlight the improvements that have been made in the situation.
The exhibit is an interesting and creative way to commemorate the anniversary of King?s April 4, 1968 assassination.
The only images that were not of the Rochester area were two black-and-white images of King. One photo shows him actively campaigning for social change and the other portrays him in a quieter moment, sitting at his kitchen table with his family in the background.
Some of the positive works in the collection include images of a multiracial girl?s soccer team and two teenage boys, one white and one black, working together to encourage people to vote at a Democratic rally last year.
A series of photographs by the members of the Baden Street Settlement featured young children playing on a jungle gym, as a metaphor for the struggle to attain King?s dream of equality. The joyous faces of the playing children were emphaticly juxtaposed with the serious messages in the captions.
A recent photo of a wooden plant holder in front of a local house that had the phrase ?KKK? spray painted on it was very thought-provoking, and reminds the viewer that racial prejudices still exist
