Providence photographer captures overlooked truths about Silicon Valley - The Boston Globe
▻https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/11/metro/providence-photographer-captures-overlooked-truths-about-silicon-valley
▻https://bostonglobe-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/mqqHgBHUEptHJkF7FfCDhgzWBfI=/506x0/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bostonglobe/67J7OLM57BGGVAUNUEHMVARROA.jpg
From Brockton to Providence, from small-town Georgia to Silicon Valley, photographer Mary Beth Meehan is challenging communities to see themselves in new ways, spurring discussions about race and inequality, the economy and the environment.
“We want people to see beyond the myths of Silicon Valley’s wealth and innovation to the ways in which real people struggle in that environment,” Meehan said. “They struggle in terms of financial security but also to find connection and community.”
In “Seeing Silicon Valley,” Meehan introduces us to Cristobal, a US Army veteran who makes $21 an hour working as a full-time security officer at Facebook but lives in a shed because he can’t afford a house in the area’s high-priced housing market.
Meehan said a former colleague connected her to Turner, a Stanford communications professor who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lived in Boston for 10 years, and graduated from Brown University. The book was designed by a Providence resident, Lucinda Hitchcock.
Turner, who now lives two miles from Google headquarters, said Silicon Valley excels at marketing itself. “But the actual community that is here on the ground is much more diverse and much more unequal than the mythology tells us,” he said. “Very few people look or make money like Mark Zuckerberg.”
Turner said Meehan’s large-scale portraits demonstrated her ability to capture images that tell you something about both the person and their community, and as a Brockton native, she brought to bear a working-class background.
“I hope people can see that the seemingly magical world of technology depends on the really hard work of a whole lot of different people,” he said. “In the same way that the Industrial Revolution in Boston didn’t just depend on the people who went to Harvard, Silicon Valley is not just the Zuckerbergs and Jobs.”
Turner said the nation’s industries need to sustain the people that build them – not just a few people at the top. “The lesson is that if you just pursue profit and innovation, you can injure your workers, pollute your landscape, and build a society you wouldn’t want to be a member of,” he said. “We can do a lot better than that.”
As an artist-in-residence at Stanford, Meehan spent six weeks introducing herself to strangers, sitting in kitchens and living rooms, listening to their stories.
She said she found tremendous unease among the people there, not only among the cashiers and waiters, but among the tech professionals and other high-income earners. And she found the anxieties of Silicon Valley reflect a nationwide gulf between the rich and the poor – the hollowing out of the middle class.
“Even though the stock market is doing well, people are struggling,” Meehan said. “If people are not doing well in Silicon Valley, then what does that say about where the country is headed?”