Nancy Shia Bio
Nancy Shia at work.
I began taking pictures of people sitting on a park bench on the New Haven Green in Connecticut during a gap year between high school and college. My first job out of high school was working for Community Progress Inc., a community organization that was part of President Johnson’s Great Society Program. My first camera was the Polaroid Swinger. The job gave me the opportunity to photograph people and neighborhoods in New Haven.
Two years later, I was living in New York City and using an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic 35mm camera. I had a darkroom in my apartment and was photographing street life and studying sociology and photography at the City College of New York (CCNY). While at CCNY, Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the college two spring semesters in a row to protest a lack of minority enrollment in the college. Documenting these protests felt like writing history. The antiwar movement was in full bloom, and I began attending big demonstrations in Washington D.C. After CCNY, I studied social work at Columbia University and documented the upper West Side neighborhood I lived in. I also photographed East Harlem, where I was assigned to the legal services office to help organize tenants, and I began to photograph people actively organizing around housing.
In 1972, I moved to D.C. to go to Antioch Law School. For the first six weeks of law school, Antioch placed students with a low-income family in D.C. I lived in Clifton Terrace with Ma Pat, a community organizer who introduced me to community leaders and taught me a lot about Chocolate City.
From 14th and Clifton Streets, I moved to a group house in Mt Pleasant and focused my camera on the law school community and the Mt Pleasant Community. By the mid 1970s, I became aware of international movements for justice by meeting people in D.C. due to U.S.-related unrest in their country.
I worked with Centro de Arte, an organization of community artists who shared their arts and expertise with the community. It was located in the Wilson Center at 15th & Irving Streets NW. Centro de Arte did murals, presented plays, had festivals, did photo shows, all while being politically active and holding rallies and demonstrations all over the city.
In 1975 I moved to Adams Morgan, and in 1979 when my building turned into a cooperative, I moved to a first-floor front apartment overlooking the corner of Columbia and Ontario Roads. What I saw out my window could fill volumes.
In 1980, the Marielitos began showing up and hanging around the vacant buildings. Homelessness was becoming more visible.
When I was an ANC commissioner from 1982-1984, my biggest accomplishment was helping establish a bilingual shelter. La Casa shelter opened in 1984 at the corner of 14th and Harvard Streets. The shelter later moved to Irving Street. I photographed extensively inside La Casa in 1991, focusing on one resident from Cuba known as Piloto. Piloto played baseball in the Negro Leagues and often carried his glove, ball and bat when he left the shelter in the morning to hang out in the street.
The topics covered in the Out My Window project are issues that sprung up all around my apartment building in Adams Morgan.
From 1976-1988 I watched the Latino Festival parade march by my building. When my children were small, we would look forward to the festival, and join the festivities by selling lemonade and sangria on our front porch.
Homelessness has always been a DC issue, which got magnified when the Marielitos arrived. I’ve always been drawn to the suffering of others, with the belief that somehow documenting it would be able to get something done to rectify conditions. That’s why I ran for ANC.
The gentrification of Adams Morgan began in the early 1970s on Willard Street. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Adams Morgan residents rose up against gentrification and all forms of tyranny.
The uprising (riots) happened in 1991, the same year I was studying photojournalism at The Corcoran. On the first night of the uprising, a friend came by to get me over to Mt Pleasant, where the action was. On the second night, I photographed from my front window, where the police drew their line and wouldn’t let anyone pass.
For almost 20 years (1986-2005) I worked as an audio technician for Federal News Service, located in the National Press Building in downtown Washington, D.C. I covered Congress, the State Department, and Cabinet Members’ speeches and appearances. During this time, I amassed thousands of images of people in government. The collection consists of countless Congress people, U.S. Senators, Secretaries of all Cabinet positions, foreign heads of state and dignitaries of all stripes. I used these images to make political posters, and called it PIG — People in Government — Art. Many of the posters were used in wheat pasting projects and during demonstrations.
When I lost my job in 2005, I began using a digital camera, and I knew I had to start archiving to preserve my photography. Soon thereafter, Martin Luther King Jr. Library Washingtoniana Division accepted my work as a collection. Before the library closed in 2017, I scanned 40+ boxes of hard copy images and donated them. Since then I’ve been systematically scanning 38 years of mostly black and white negatives. The job is not even half done.
I continue to photograph the communities of Adams Morgan, Mt Pleasant and Columbia Heights, albeit slowed down by a pandemic. The protests and demonstrations continue because racism and inequality continue; homelessness and gentrification continue because property rights are put ahead of human need. There are still a lot of stories about marginalized people to be told. A lot I still see right out my window.