Moving Pictures

cali dreaming: On leave from his teaching gigs, photographer Tony Rocco will spend five months in his mother's native Colombia.
Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

Tony Rocco brings South America to his Northern Liberties darkroom.

by Lori Hill

Two teenagers sit around a table on a hot June afternoon, looking at two prints of the same photograph. A teacher rustles through a supply cabinet, in a room full of computer workstations and bulletin boards tacked thick with negatives.

"Mr. Rocco, these papers are different. I don't like the shiny one."

Jennita, one of Tony Rocco's students, squints, trying to discern just what she does and doesn't like about the paper her photograph's been printed on. Rocco is working with Jennita and Jose in The Light Room, the collaborative darkroom space he and a group of fellow students from Temple Center City established in 2002. Through a program called Exposure, Rocco teaches inner-city kids his own passion, photography, and today they're learning about self-portraits.

Jose's ahead of the game: He already took one at home, and is eager to print it in The Light Room's neat, well-equipped facility at the corner of American and Poplar in Northern Liberties.

Tony Rocco, Man Blowing Bubbles (2004), gicle print, 12 inches by 18 inches.

The Light Room, which also has a healthy online presence as a forum for discussion and critique, just merged with the Center for the Photographic Image (CPI), a venture of photographers Dominic Episcopo, Ashley Peel Pinkham and others to provide awareness of and opportunities to learn about photography. (It was also the administrator of City Paper's annual photo contest.) CPI was getting to be too much to handle for its founders, but they didn't want to see it dissolve entirely. Episcopo and Pinkham reached out to Rocco and The Light Room. "When we sat down we realized that both groups really complemented each other," says Rocco. "CPI was made up of mostly established photographers who had their own darkrooms and facilities. The Light Room was mostly young, emerging photographers who needed a place to work and had its own communal space. It seemed like a perfect match."

The two organizations, now more than 60 members strong, became the Philadelphia Center for the Photographic Image (PCPI), with the same goal: promoting the photographic arts, offering darkroom facilities and workshops on scanning and lighting, as well as support to artists. PCPI, which eventually will look for larger facilities that would include a gallery space, had its official debut last month with a group exhibition of members' work at Da Vinci Art Alliance.

But it's the community-oriented mission that Rocco's passionate about. He heads PCPI's Outreach Committee, and runs the Exposure program (for which his Temple fraternity bought cameras and materials). "They're great kids, they do great work. It doesn't look like kids' work at all. They're really dedicated," says Rocco of his stewards. "These kids are like my own kids, I've known them for years, I know their families." Rocco's even guided them toward summer jobs as youth counselors and softball coaches. His pride in their work supercedes all, and he's gotten their photos shown at 3rd Street Gallery, Rustica Pizza near The Light Room and Temple University.

A film major, Rocco, now 36, felt more drawn to the one-man-show of photography. "As a still photographer, a street photographer, all I have to do is worry about myself and my camera. Do I have film? Batteries? OK, I'm good to go." But after stints in public relations and community organizing, he found a home in education. "It's the most amazing, rewarding job. I've never been as tired, never put as much time and energy into something," he says.

It would seem that Rocco's got an unlimited supply of time and energy. Besides his work with PCPI, his full-time job as a computer teacher at Burgos Elementary at Fourth and Lehigh and a current stint with the school district's Summer Robotics Institute, teaching kids to capture motion in photography, he also takes his own pictures. This Friday, he'll open an exhibition called "True Faces of Colombia," photos of his mother's hometown of Cali, which Rocco feels is grossly misunderstood.

"I want to show people what it's really like," he says of the city, infamous for its history of drug cartels and kidnappings. "Instead of [people] watching CNN. And Hollywood movies — oh my God, that drives me nuts. So many cliches. They make it look like a war zone and people buy into that."

Fifteen years ago, as a teenager growing up at Fifth and Morris, Rocco bought into it, too.

As one of the few non-white kids in the neighborhood, he felt different, and of his culture, he says, "I never really identified with it. I latched on to the negative stereotypes, I wanted nothing to do with it. I even went through an anti-Latino period. I told my parents not to speak Spanish to me. I almost lost my Spanish."

All that changed in 1990, when he visited Cali for the first time.

"It inspired me creatively. I thought, This is me. I found a missing part of myself." When he returned to South Philly, his attitude about being Colombian took a turn. "I came back and I was all Latino," he says laughing. "I became president of the Latin-American Student Association, I became Mr. Latino."

Rocco's gone back twice since — once helped by an Independence Foundation grant, and this August, he'll take a leave from the school district and spend five months in Colombia. On his return, he'll have a show of his Cali work at 3rd Street Gallery. Rocco will stay with relatives in Colombia, and will plant himself firmly in the community, finding families he'll treat almost as case studies: rich, middle class, working class, poor and ethnically diverse. He wants to capture Cali as he sees it: a city of three million people, full of dancing and food and music, and people whose lives center around the family. "You know, in this country we have everything, but for the most part people are still miserable. There, they have crap, but they're totally family-oriented and generally very giving people," says Rocco. "On every corner there's somebody begging, a kid juggling for money. And this dirt-poor guy comes through with a carton of oranges and just gives them away."

This isn't Rocco's first experience as a visual anthropologist. From 2002 to 2003, he served as the photo-documentarian for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's "Latino Philadelphia: Our Journeys, Our Communities" project. Rocco shot Mexican construction workers, Honduran and Salvadoran immigrants playing soccer and Day of the Dead celebrations in the city.

"I had worked in the Latino community a long time — since I was an undergrad at Temple — and thought I knew it pretty well. What I discovered was that I knew parts of it really well, but there were people doing great things that I never heard of," he says. "For over a year I attended every community activity, church gathering, parade, you name it. I went to a Peruvian family's house for Thanksgiving and a Colombian family's for Christmas Eve. It was really cool, and I got to learn a lot more about how truly diverse the Latino community in Philly really is."

Rocco hopes the documentary skills he gained through the HSP project will help him in Cali, where he also plans to draw on his film background by spending as much time with a video camera as a still camera. Eventually he wants to turn his work in Colombia into a book.

For now, though, it's teaching that drives him. "I love working with kids even in my free time, especially with doing something they really like. At the end of the day you can see what you did. Instead of busting your hump to make rich people richer. That's why I come, that's why I do it."

Jose shows off another photo. It's a crisp, documentary-style image of a pile of trash sitting in an overgrown lot, in front of a wall graffitied with the words "no tire basura" ("don't throw trash"). Jose then talks about the "ironic" nature of the photograph and why he was attracted to the scene.

Rocco says, "My photography kids are taught the basics and then told to photograph whatever interests them. It is incredible to see how each kid sees their world differently and finds inspiration in different places. Their work is "pure,' they don't think about what it should look like, they just do what "feels right' to them."

"True Faces of Colombia," reception Fri., July 8, 6-9 p.m., exhibit through July 30, Raices Culturales Latinoamericanos, 2757 N. Fifth St., 215-425-1390. For more information about the Philadelphia Center for the Photographic Image, visit www.thelightroom.org.