“Life Between Fingers”: A Response to News Photography of an “Urban Ghetto”

This photo essay updates research previously presented in Visual Communication Quarterly about news characterizations of a “Black neighborhood” in Iowa City, Iowa. Shot by preschoolers in the city's Southeast Side, the images in this essay—peppered with the inadvertent appearance of the photographers' fingers—added to an artistic value that cast life there being other than dangerous, dark, and devious. Whereas hands can often be used to conceal, the fingers in these photographs frame special and specific glimpses of life, ultimately presenting a counternarrative to neighborhood characterizations constructed by news photographs.