As a historian, it’s in my nature and training to wonder about change over time. So it was perhaps inevitable that I would revisit my 2004-05 project, Faces of Reading: 1000 Portraits of a City during the summer of 2016. Those images – exhibited on the walls of what was then the Albright College Cultural Center on Penn Street, or on the famous poster, or on my ongoing website, http://facesofreadin
g.zenfolio.com/ - were snapshots in time. As such they documented – indeed, celebrated - the diversity of Reading residents at a particular moment. Now, more than a decade later, they have become what historians call “primary sources,” eyewitness accounts of an earlier moment, objects for potential comparison, and, with the pursuit of Faces of Reading + 10, points along a trajectory of change. Throughout this process ten years later, I have enjoyed the collaboration of Angela Cremer, a Senior honors student in Communications and Photography at Albright College. Angela is a native of Berks County and the granddaughter of Reading natives. She is an accomplished photographer and editor. Her chief tasks have been to assist with the detective work of finding our original faces, to document photographically all aspects of the project, and to engage with all the participants. My goal is to study both individual and collective trajectories of change. To demographers and actuaries, many of these changes are utterly predictable. They and I knew that a number of my original sitters, of whatever age, would no longer be with us in 2015. Of those that survive, the babies have passed into childhood, the teens into adulthood, and the aged into senescence, while those who were 45 then pretend that 55 is now the new forty-five. The steady march of years has brought predictable life events as well: marriages, births, divorces, triumphs, and disappointments. This photography project looks for the traces these events have left in the faces we re-photograph. This is a deeply human story, one that we all share. Our goal for the Summer of 2016 is to reflect upon the harvest we collected last Summer, to design and print a new poster, to write and design a book about the project, and to build support for a public exhibition of the Faces. We will also undertake selected projects to further enhance our Community's vision of itself.
~ John Pankratz
