Monthly Archives: July 2010

To be honest…

Posted on by cbaird

I’d been thinking about my Soul of Athens project for a long time.  Working on a photo essay in Carbondale, Ohio, the entirety of my winter term, I’d begun to learn what it meant to do something in-depth; meeting lots of really, really interesting people along the way. In particular, there was one story that I planned on focusing on when I returned from spring break.  However, after our first Soul of Athens class and almost immediately after I’d left the “Experience” group’s first meeting, I found myself in Carbondale, Ohio, searching without much luck, for the two people I’d intended to spend time with and photograph.  They were nowhere to be found.

That said, while I searched and searched, I ultimately came back to our next meeting with several story ideas also based in Carbondale.  Beyond working there most of the winter, I also thought Carbondale was a small town that represented a lot of the history of the area as well as, the current issues in the region (not to mention that I just enjoyed spending time there).  Near the end of the winter term I’d spent in Carbondale, I’d meet Bucky Hall, his wife, Christie, and their two boys, Michael and Aaron.  At the time I’d meet them, they were living in Christie’s mother’s house, a small trailer right in the center of Carbondale.  I’d previously heard that, before they moved into the trailer, they’d squatted in a small camper above Carbondale but I only had a vague sense of how much history rested on that land.  When I returned to Carbondale after my break, I soon found out that – with the good weather – Bucky, Christie, and their family had moved back into the camper and were trying to revitalize the land up there.  Ultimately, I decided that my original story would require more time than we had for Soul of Athens and I devoted myself to spending time with Bucky and his family.

Looking back on it now, I couldn’t be happier with my decision; not because I’m happy with the work, but because Bucky, Christie, Michael and Aaron were so wonderfully open and honest with me about their lives.  There’s a lot of talk within photography, and especially at OU, about why photographers choose to focus on the stories that they do.  When I began this story, I really had to ask myself those questions.  At the end of the day, however, I found the story  so compelling because, in my mind, it was an opportunity to tell one family’s history while watching another be created. To me, the piece was just as much about Bucky’s intense personal connection with the land on which he was raised as it was about the family he’s now raising on it.

In modern life, we don’t often have the same connection to the land on which we live as previous generations have had.  We don’t farm the land, we don’t stay at home for as long, we move away and we leave behind.  Obviously, the location of Bucky’s upbringing had pretty polarizing memories associated with it; the tenderness he shared for the way in which he was raised alongside such tragedies as the suicide of his brother.  In his attempts to leave, Bucky would constantly express how the act of moving away was tantamount to abandoning his family.  When his brother committed suicide, I think that just compounded that feeling.  Now Bucky’s not only revitalizing the land in order to make a home for his current family but also – in some sense – trying to come to terms with that trauma; in the act of renewing the land, he seems to be making amends with the very real decisions he made that drew him away from Carbondale in the first place.  The thought of being so deeply and emotionally connected to a piece of land that was yours but now isn’t, especially in a time and place where it’s rare to see someone care so much for something, was extremely moving to me.  And, of course, the very practical reality that you might be asked to move your entire family’s way of life at any moment, was staggering.  Ultimately, the resilience, courage, and love that I saw in the face of these types of conditions, was a story that I thought people should know about.

Bryan Thomas

My story is about a family…

Posted on by cbaird

their business, their way they life and how it all works together. I have been doing this story on the family behind Ancient Roots since when it all started in February for a class assignment. For the class assignment everything fell through and on my Sunday jaunt through the Athens farmers markets I just happened to walk up to the Ancient Roots stand and ask for Lauren’s number and it all started from there.

Lauren Genter and Justin Reynolds are the owners of Ancient Roots and also the mother and father of their two sons Immanuel and Addae, who play a key role in their business. Ancient Roots is a local business in Athens Ohio that makes herbal remedies of all kinds, kombucha and “just local stuff for local people” as Lauren says.

Not knowing what she was getting into Lauren agreed to let me to do a story on their business. I ended up fallowed her for a little more than a month. I finished with a story about her and her two sons, Addae and Immanuel.

When Soul of Athens started I decided that I really was going to do a story on Ancient Roots and so I have. After about a little more than three months I have not only made a story on their family business but I have created true friends. Lauren and Justin where the most friendly and open people I have photographed, telling me about themselves, their family and beliefs. Many times I never took a photo I just sat and talked with them.

But sadly with MANY, MANY (can I say that again) MANY late nights of hard work and in my opinion a wonderful story, my story, was among many other similar stories therefore got cut. Even though I had put more work into this story than have even put into a story I am glade that I got to work with the students I did, learned what I learned form them and from Lauren and Justin. The people I photographed and worked with make all my stress and hard work worth it in the end. But because you will not be able to see my hard work I will tell you just a little bit about what it is all about by some images that where in my video and quotes pulled from the audio.

Ancient Roots is a true locally grown business but not only in the since of their produce; Ancient Roots was started by the creations of creams and healing salves made for their son, Addae. The work put into their produce is scheduled around their family time, allowing them to always be with kids and allowing them to chose when they want work. Lauren says, “Our business is inextricable from our family. If Justin’s with the kids I’m at the office making stuff and if Justin is at the office making stuff then I am at the park with the kids. That’s part of what we wanted. We wanted that for our family, for to be together and to work for ourselves.” They wanted a business for their family but also good for other things: “You know something we could do that was good for the planet and good for people and good for our family.”

Ancient Roots was created through Lauren and Justin’s’ way of life. “Everything that we use is chemical free a lot of that comes from beautiful land here in Athens. Some of it is certified organic from, some of it we pick by hand walking through the hills or in our garden or in people’s that we knows gardens and farms. You know we are trading with local famers, people in other places in Ohio, and you know the circles go out from there,” said Lauren. “The idea is that we are making stuff here with local ingredients for people who live here in this environment that the plants where ideally raised in too. So I feel like even if you never meet that specific plant you know each other. You know I think there is a healing in that goes beyond what you can explain,” said Lauren at the ending of my story, which sums up their life and business. Sadly I cannot put everything in here so there is a bit left out. But I hope you enjoyed my visual story translated into words by the words of Lauren Genter.

Halie Cousineau

Bringing Some Soul to Drupal

Posted on by cbaird

Once again, for this year’s edition of Soul of Athens we decided to use Drupal as our
CMS. Drupal gave a level of flexibility and ease of use that matched our knowledge of
both programming and CMSs.

While using Drupal, we ran into a few unique problems that required some interesting
solutions.

Let me prerequisite this by saying I do not claim to be some know-all Drupal or PHP
guru; these are just some solutions that happened to work for us in our situation.
As you may know, this year’s site was built around the idea of having multiple editions,
five to be precise, each with a unique template. While one approach to that would have
been to load specific CSS files for each page template on each page and piece of
content, we decided to do it a bit more dynamically with PHP. The idea behind the code
was to inject part of the current URL path into the body tag so that we could specify
each CSS rule more specifically with each edition’s links and divs:

<body id="<?php $edition = explode("/", $node->path); print $edition[0];?>">

There it is. Simple, but it does exactly what I need it to do. What the PHP is doing is
taking the path of the node (expression/ink, for example) and exploding the string into
an array that is being delimitated by the “/” character. Then I use the first element in
the array as the id of the body.

Alright phew.

While we were building the node templates for the pieces of content, it became quite
obvious that the way in which we were entering the contributors was slightly
problematic. When we would go into the devel module and inspect the node contents,
the only content available for the contributors was their “number.” The reason why that
was happening is still a bit of a mystery. Nevertheless, I was presented with a large list
of numbers that I was going to have to somehow correlate to an author. Instead of
going and spending an hour or so constructing a keyed array of values in PHP off a list
formated like this,

0|Matthew Anderson
1|Jonathan Adams
2|Josh Birnbaum
3|Victor Blue
4|Kiersten Bonifant …..

… I wrote a quick and dirty script in C++ to process the text into the format that I
needed, which took all of .0025 seconds to run:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main ()
{
ifstream ins;
ofstream ous;
ins.open("parse.txt");
string tmp,tmp2,tmp3;
while (!ins.fail())
{
int i;
getline(ins,tmp);
for (i =0;tmp[i] != '|';++i)
std::cout<<tmp[i];
++i;
std::cout<<"=> \" ";
std::cout<<tmp.substr (i,tmp.size());
std::cout<<"\",";
}
}

… which ended up spitting out something that looked like this:

0=> ” Matthew Anderson”,1=> ” Jonathan Adams “,2=> ” Josh Birnbaum”,3=>
” Victor Blue”,4=> ” Kiersten Bonifant”

While that solved one problem, we also had to figure out a way to correlate all the users’
roles with their names and then display that in an organized fashion. The first thing we
tackled was how to grab the roles that people held:

That is what the input format looked like in Drupal. We were using a single select dropdowns
and then a multi-select field for their roles because one person could do multiple
things in any given piece.

So let’s take a look at the code … and then we can talk about it:

for ( $ii = 0; $ii <= 5; $ii++)
{
print("<li><a class='mouse_over' href='#' title='<strong>Roles:</strong>< br/> ");
for ( $i = 0; $i < count($node->field_content_role_1); $i++){

if ($ii == 0&&$arr2[$node->field_content_role_1[$i]['value']])
{

print $arr2[$node->field_content_role_1[$i]['value']];

}

if ($ii == 1&&$arr2[$node->field_content_role_2[$i]['value']])
{
print $arr2[$node->field_content_role_2[$i]['value']];
print(” “);

}

if ($ii == 2&&$arr2[$node->field_content_role_3[$i]['value']])
{
print $arr2[$node->field_content_role_3[$i]['value']];
print(” “);
}
if ($ii == 3&&$arr2[$node->field_content_role_4[$i]['value']])
{
print $arr2[$node->field_content_role_4[$i]['value']];
print(” “);
}
if ($ii == 4&&$arr2[$node->field_content_role_5[$i]['value']])
{
print $arr2[$node->field_content_role_5[$i]['value']];
print(” “);
}
}

print("'>");
if ($ii == 0)
print $arr[$node->field_content_contributors[0]['value']];
if ($ii == 1)
print $arr[$node->field_content_contributor_2[0]['value']];
if ($ii == 2)
print $arr[$node->field_content_contributor_3[0]['value']];
if ($ii == 3)
print $arr[$node->field_content_contributor_4[0]['value']];
if ($ii == 4)
print $arr[$node->field_content_contributor_5[0]['value']];
print("</a></li>");
}
?>

Basically, what I did was set up a variable called $arr that holds all of the
contributors and another array, $arr2, that contains the roles that someone
could hold (and, yes, it is also a keyed array).

Then it gets a bit more complicated. I set a nesting looping structure that goes through all five possible contributors (variable $ii) and within that goes through their possible roles. If the role field is not NULL and $i is at the corresponding contributor it prints the role(s) within the title field of a link.

The reason for all of this code is that we really wanted to refine how peoples roles were displayed. Instead of listing the contribtors roles below or beside them we decided to do something a but more dynamic and throw some jquery into the mix, with something called Qtip.

So all that work for something so simple? Yes, but that is what makes this years site so great, it’s the little things that seem almost expected that work so intuitively that really make this years site shine.
I hope this explanation helps and pulls back the curtain that all to often falls on those glued to their monitors coding away.

Good luck and Thanks for reading.

Sam Saccone