A new UCLA photography exhibition at UCLA invites visitors to see the Los Angeles, including its everyday pleasures, unexpected obstacles and overlooked details, through the eyes of six wheelchair-using Black and Latino artists living with spinal cord injuries.
On display Nov. 9–13 at UCLA's Kerckhoff Hall Art Gallery, "At Eye Level / A la Altura de los Ojos" captures the photographers' homes, neighborhoods and daily lives. The exhibition is a collaboration between UCLA's interdisciplinary disability studies program and the Violence Recovery and Prevention Program at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, where the six artists, all former patients, now mentor others recovering from gun violence.
Spearheaded by Salih Can Açıksöz, a UCLA professor of medical and sociocultural anthropology, and organized through the university's Heumann Community Partnerships Lab, the project provided participants with photography equipment and hands-on workshops to explore their surroundings and tell their own stories. Along the way, they shared memories, experimented with new perspectives and discovered fresh ways of seeing familiar places.
"This has been a great reminder of how much more is out there that we don't see in a single frame and how many more frames are within that single frame," said participant Albert Bartee III.
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