Creating Community, Changing Lives: A Message from the Executive Director

This past year we celebrated our 10th anniversary and we're proud to say that the Bronx Documentary Center model of community-based documentary journalism and deep engagement with our neighborhood continues to change lives. We are continuing to provide exhibitions, festivals, training, and education programs to thousands of Bronx residents. Our exhibitions remain on the cutting edge of documentary practice—in 2022 we presented an amazing roster of exhibitions addressing vital social and political issues: The Storming of the Capital, Look at the USA: Peter Van Agtmael, The Congo in Conversation, and An Expression of Absence: Selections from the Arab Documentary Photography Program. We’ve continued our Urgency series, a real-time powerful response to critical worldwide events, with a compelling pop-up show, Urgency: Ukraine. And this past summer we celebrated our 5th year of the Latin American Foto Festival, bringing work from throughout Latin America to the neighborhoods surrounding the BDC, with in-person workshops, tours, panel discussions and other community events.

The middle and high school students in our Bronx Junior Photo League classes are producing powerful work, becoming talented photographers and photojournalists and winning dozens of Scholastic Art & Writing awards. In 2021 and 2022 our high school seniors, supported by the BDC’s college prep counseling and workshops, were accepted into colleges including NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Smith College, Bates College, Skidmore, Syracuse, and University of Rochester.
  
This past year we continued and expanded Foto en Español, our Spanish language photography classes for South Bronx adults, which have had a huge positive response from our community. The BDC Films Fellowship program continues to train emerging documentary filmmakers who will help to energize and diversify the profession. BDC alumni are on the front line, working for National Geographic, The New York Times, Getty Images, and numerous other publications.
 
Everything we’ve accomplished in the first ten years of the BDC’s existence has been made possible through the contributions and support of a loyal, generous network of friends and colleagues. With your help, the BDC will continue its crucial work for another decade and beyond; together, we will succeed in transforming lives and strengthening community. 

Warm regards,

Michael Kamber
BDC Founder and Executive Director