Photographer highlights beauty ignored in struggling communities – SFGate

Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

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Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities.
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

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Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 3 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities.
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 4 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities.
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 5 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 6 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 7 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

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This photo of a woman along with colorful nail art is section of Sensabaugh’s prove to at the Betti Ono Gallery. less

This photo of a woman along with colorful nail art is section of Sensabaugh’s prove to at the Betti Ono Gallery.
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 9 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 10 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 11 of 16
Sensabaugh’s photos prove to the struggles and joys of the individuals living in those communities. less

Sensabaugh’s photos prove to the struggles and joys of the individuals living in those communities.
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

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Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting black, or as she prefers, “melanated”, communities, revealing both their struggles and their joys. She’s highlighted some of the pieces for a prove to in Oakland, her hometown, called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting black, or as she prefers, “melanated”, communities, revealing both their struggles and their joys. She’s highlighted some of the pieces for a prove to in … more
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 13 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Image 14 of 16
Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Brittani Sensabaugh

Photographer Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” less

Photographer Brittani Sensabaugh has actually spent the past few years documenting struggles and joys of individuals in forgotten communities. Her Oakland prove to is called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.”
Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Photographer highlights beauty ignored in struggling communities

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It started quietly at first, on a Brand-new York City subway train. Brittani Sensabaugh was keeping to herself, wearing a hoodie that read “Oakland,” as soon as an older white woman looked right at her.

“Don’t go there,” she said as she pointed at her sweatshirt. That place was full of drugs and violence. “She was merely saying truly negative points concerning a place that I grew up in,” Sensabaugh says. “I was getting off the train, and I stopped her and said, ‘You know, I’m none of those things, and I’m from there.’”

Sensabaugh left the train angry. Disappointed, too, she says, now that she thinks concerning it a few years later. She wondered exactly how a woman that had probably never been to Oakland could so easily dismiss it — so easily dismiss all the individuals that called it home. “It made me hope to return residence and prove to the Oakland that I was raised in, and merely the love and culture that I came up in, and additionally bring awareness to why the destruction is happening in these areas.”

So she did. She came residence to East Oakland, the place where she’d grown up, and walked the same drags she used to walk years before, only this time she carried a camera, and she developed a visual archive of the place she had known. “It taught me struggle, yet it taught me more love,” she says. “Just what I saw in East Oakland is Just what I see even now as soon as I document it. Our individuals are beautiful.”

Homecoming show

A selection of the photographs that grew from this job — along along with others taken in others communities — form something of a homecoming prove to for Sensabaugh at the Betti Ono Gallery in Oakland that she’s called “#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin.” (The exhibition was scheduled to run through April, yet will certainly be closing Friday, Feb. 26.)

Sensabaugh, that still lives in Brand-new York City, has actually assembled a multifaceted portrait of black communities — or, as she prefers to call them, “melanated” communities — that are often ignored. Outsiders see these places as hopeless, she says, yet that’s because they don’t know them.

“that is documenting us? that is documenting the minutes that are pure?” she asks, waving toward a gallery wall that shows a daughter riding higher on her father’s shoulders and a mother leaning down to kiss her little girl. “These minutes right here — love being shown — that is documenting that?”

Sensabaugh has actually wide, expressive eyes. Maybe that’s the reason, being about her, you sometimes get hold of the feeling she could see deeper compared to most. She wraps herself, much more frequently compared to not, in sturdy colors and patterns and begins emails along with the greeting “Peace love!” She calls individuals kings and empresses, little youngsters are “seeds,” and she makes a special effort to compliment their natural hair. “Ahh. Your hair is so beautiful,” she’ll say. “I love your hair.” (A substantial section of the prove to is dedicated to youngsters staring straight in to the camera and to the natural hairstyles she finds as she walks the streets.)

Wanting to write

Back in higher school, as soon as she was merely 17 and growing up in East Oakland, Sensabaugh was setting her mind toward writing — something she got from her mom. “My mother’s a beautiful writer,” she says. “She would certainly constantly write me these uplifting notes.” Her brother believed some visuals to go along with all the words could be nice, and Sensabaugh didn’t disagree. yet it would certainly be years prior to she’d figure out Just what to do along with the Kodak camera he gave her then. It would certainly take 6 years to be exact, 6 years that would certainly unfold in a staccato, two-year rhythm.

Two years after he gave her the camera, Sensabaugh’s brother died, unexpectedly, in his sleep at the age of 28. His death stirred something in her and she decided on up the camera and began cataloging street fashion.

Fashion photos

Two years after her brother’s death, Sensabaugh followed fashion photography to Brand-new York, only to recognize the subject was wearing thin. There, individuals traded in designer names. “I was doing it because I like expression,” she says. The label didn’t matter; the story did. Then, two years after the move to Brand-new York, the woman on the subway had something to say.

During the years that followed, Sensabaugh’s project grew well beyond East Oakland. She went Spine to Brand-new York and shot in Queens, Brooklyn and Harlem. Then she started making her means to places in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. Detroit and Brand-new Orleans are up next. “There were times I couldn’t afford my damn rent in Brand-new York, yet I made sure I documented a city. I made sure I did it.”

When she plans a trip, she purposefully seeks out neighborhoods and projects that are talked concerning only due to their crime rates. She builds up trust first, starting along with conversations, being as open as possible, constantly along with the goal of bringing out the “light that is there.”

Acknowledging realities

Still, there’s evident struggle in her work, too. She highlights and uplifts while acknowledging certain realities. In one photograph, a man smokes crack cocaine. Several images attract attention to exactly how difficult it is to discover nutritious meals in these areas — a liquor sign floats in one background and a street vendor pumps his fists, full of soda, in to the air. One image shows only a woman’s hands, fresh along with red acrylic nails, holding a group of Newport cigarettes. (Later, after she’s left the gallery, Sensabaugh posts two documents on her Instagram account, outlining the means tobacco companies target vulnerable communities.)

“We are beauty, we are love, yet we are at war. We are in the trenches, we are fighting every day,” Sensabaugh says. yet if you leave it to outsiders, these stories don’t get hold of told, that beauty never comes out, and the scene on the subway repeats itself.

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost

#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin: Through Friday, Feb. 26. Betti Ono Gallery, 1427 Broadway, Oakland. Follow Brittani Sensabaugh on Instagram by searching for @brittsense.