Publication: San Francisco Chronicle; Date: Jun 8, 2016; Section: Datebook; Page: E1

In land of startups, new lens on hungerInterns learn photography, document struggle for food in SoMaBy Katherine Seligman

The grainy color photo is focused on the slender rib cage of a woman, beside her a broken food stamp card and a child’s piggy bank.

“I was sitting on my bed thinking that people are still going hungry,” said Jade Harper, one of nine young men and women asked by UC Berkeley’s Schoolof Public Health to visually document their struggles to get adequate nutrition. “The card was already broken, but it represents the broken system. The piggybank shows how far people have to go into their savings.”

Their collection, “I Got Nothing,” illustrates just how hard it can be to afford food in the South of Market neighborhood, land of tech startups and constructioncranes, but also home to many who are poor and marginally housed.

The young photographers live in San Francisco’s first city-funded permanent supportive housing complex, a building on Fifth Street run by CommunityHousing Partnership. Most grew up in foster care, and many were formerly homeless. Like Harper, who is 25 and has a job with the city health department,they are working, in school or seeking treatment, paths to jobs and more stable lives.

The idea for the photo collection — the Young Adults PhotoVoice Project — stemmed from an ongoing study of the health of the building’s residents led byDr. Colette Auerswald, associate professor at the School of Public Health. Preliminary results showed most were worried about “food insecurity.” A majorityknew what it was like to skip meals or go without food for an entire day.

With funding from the Berkeley Food Institute, researchers hired nine residents as interns. An instructor taught them the basics of photography, aboutlighting, composition and framing. Starting in January, the interns met weekly to choose a prompt about dealing with food that would guide their snapshots.They discussed their experiences and composed titles, captions and narratives.

Over the next three months, they went out each week to take pictures. What they discovered, through an amateur lens, is the power of photography tocapture what the eye misses.

The photos, briefly exhibited at Intersection for the Arts, will be shown sometime in the next school year at UC Berkeley.

They include conceptual shots about hunger and realistic pictures of excess food on the edge of rotting, the contents of free food boxes, bleak rooftopsfilled with litter instead of gardens, pets, and one unwieldy spaghetti sandwich (“making the best of what you have”). Not surprisingly, noodles play a centralrole. Top Ramen, which might cost just 29 cents, can be cooked easily or eaten raw as “hippie chips.”

“I’m eating noodles I’m not fond of because I’m hungry and there’s nothing else to eat …” writes Justin Smith, 23, who shares custody of his 2-year-olddaughter, and photographed a food box containing Top Ramen, juice boxes, granola bars and other packaged items with a long shelf life.

Another of his photos shows a mass of cubed meat that looks as if it’s ready for the landfill.

“This is donated chicken,” he writes. “On camera it doesn’t look like chicken. It looked like dead mice. It doesn’t look very appetizing. You’re eatingsomeone else’s garbage.”

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/SanFranciscoChronicle/PrintComponentVie...

1 of 5 6/8/16, 6:46 PM

Jessica Holland, 23, shot a picture of a dollar bill soaked in soap on a plate.

“Every day we have to fill our plates,” she said in an interview. “Money controls if we have food or not, if we are happy or not. Every day I think, ‘Will I havea full plate?’ ”

She put soap on the bill, she said, because she wanted people to think about how much work needs to be done to clean up the idea of getting food topeople who need it.

“A lot of people don’t realize that three meals a day are a treat,” said Holland, who spent time homeless on and off after her parents died several years ago.“If I have food, I like to make sure my friends have some too. … One of us might have instant potatoes and another has Spam. That’s a meal for three of us.”

All are familiar with the anxiety of waking up worrying if there is anything for breakfast — they have mini refrigerators and access to a shared kitchen — andwhether that will be the last meal of the day. Food stamps worth just under $200, for those who get them, don’t last a month.

The housing complex hands out a list of places with free meals and groceries, but those often require recipients to identify as homeless or unstablyhoused, said Auerswald. And many of the residents, now housed, don’t want handouts, she said.

Mercedes Lackey, 20, works in a grocery store deli department, but can’t afford the food there. If she’s lucky there might be fruit in the break room, whichmight be all she eats that day. She photographed, among other subjects, chicken about to be discarded.

“I hope that people will see that just because someone looks like this on the outside, not everything is OK,” said Lackey, who helps support her mother.“Getting housed doesn’t solve everything.”

For Holland, the project reignited her interest in art, which she hopes to pursue. She had already taken a photography class and earned money selling herown snapshots of the city.

“My pride and joy,” she said, reaching for the small digital camera all interns got to keep. “I can take a picture in an alley of light and dark, with two peopledoing drugs behind me, but I just see the light.”

Katherine Seligman is a Bay Area freelance writer.

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/SanFranciscoChronicle/PrintComponentVie...

2 of 5 6/8/16, 6:46 PM

Leah Millis / The Chronicle

Jade Harper holds a self-portrait she took as part of a PhotoVoice project called “I Got Nothing.”

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/SanFranciscoChronicle/PrintComponentVie...

3 of 5 6/8/16, 6:46 PM

Young Adults PhotoVoice Project

A photo by Mercedes Lackey, 20, features her breakfast and her cat, Blue.

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/SanFranciscoChronicle/PrintComponentVie...

4 of 5 6/8/16, 6:46 PM

Leah Millis / The Chronicle

Justin Smith, 23, holds a photograph he took for a PhotoVoice project called “I Got Nothing,” of a vending machine that he can access in his building butthat is full of junk food.

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODE/SanFranciscoChronicle/PrintComponentVie...

5 of 5 6/8/16, 6:46 PM