Kensington Ave Philadelphia At Night Time.

The worst Street in Philadelphia

The Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia has been in the spotlight of major news outlets for several years, and not in a good way.

Local and national journalists armed with cameras descended on the homeless encampments and beneath overpasses where widespread opioid use was rampant, taking pictures of anything they could find.

Community activist Gloria Cartagena said none of that media attention was good.

“I live right on Kensington and Somerset. I see everything, but I’ve never seen a journalist stop me to talk about something good,” Cartagena said. “They just snap, snap, snap, snap.”

Cartagena recalls seeing two men with cameras walking down Kensington Avenue wearing bullet proof vests. She watched them take pictures of people using drugs on the street, and laughing about it.

She approached them to find out what they were doing.

“They were trying to start some magazine or whatever it was. I think they were just BSing me, for real,” she said. “I didn’t like what they were doing. You’re coming down Kensington Ave. like you’re ready for some war, with bulletproof vests. You’re in front of people doing their needles and stuff, at their worst time. This is not what people need to see. People need to see people being helped.”

Cartagena will be participating in a community Zoom meeting about the effects of photojournalism on Kensington. It is coordinated through the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC), a community photography studio and exhibition space in the Crane Arts Building in Kensington.

“Do No Harm: Community, Cameras, and Respect” on Friday evening will be an online community discussion that anyone can join, to share experiences with photojournalists in the neighborhood and talk about the impact of documentation on Kensington.

The panel was developed in part by Tony Heriza, a documentary filmmaker working on a film about the Storefront, an art and community services hub set up in Kensington by Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Heriza became interested in Kensington after seeing a 2018 article in the New York Times magazine about the drug epidemic in the neighborhood.

“What we saw from that article was how a lot of the life of the people and the hopes of Kensington were not documented,” he said. “We felt we could address what was going on, but with a different tone and a different angle on the community.”

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