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Ryan Brandenberg stumbled onto the South Philly Review as it lay on a doorstep six years ago. Raised in the Northeast, the area was not his familiar stomping ground, but it would soon become a second home.
"I knew [the area] pretty well, strangely; I just did. I was excited to shoot down there," Brandenberg, who began freelancing for the Review that same year before moving to the staff photographer position a short time later, said. "It’s an interesting place. There is a lot to look at.
"I can’t explain it, exactly what I mean, because it has attitude. It was South Philly. It was cool."
The gig — which he continues sporadically as a Review freelancer one more — brought Brandenberg up close and personal with the community. His time was well-spent, honing his technical skills and engendering an interest in documenting people.
His knack for capturing the innate connection between people and their homes carried into Brandenberg’s latest project, "Roots Run Deep Here," a self-published book documenting returning Hurricane Katrina victims of the Ninth Ward.
"Initially, I went nine months after Katrina in May of 2006. And I basically walked around, I met some of the people who were there," the 33-year-old said. "When [the hurricane] first happened, it was unlike anything I had watched before.
"I had never been that moved — people on the rooftops of their house."
Many visits later, Brandenberg is set to bring his images to a big screen at tonight’s First Person Arts Salon du Festival as part of the Painted Bride Art Center’s weeklong event. Tickets to the two-hour 6 p.m. event are $15 to $20 and will include works by Jennifer Baker, Stephan Salisbury, Nimisha Ladva and Laura Jean Zito.
"It’s an organization that wants to give documentarians and people who work in memoir a stage, " Brandenberg said. "In this case, it’s an 18-minute audio slide show of the faces and voices, people I photographed and I recorded.
"It is their testimony."
After a colleague who helped Brandenberg put together his tribute recommended he apply to First Person Arts, the photographer submitted the audio slide show he had created for his Web site, http://www.rootsrundeephere.com/2009/07/.
"It’s a continuous track that I put together from snippets. It’s selected clips of my interviews with them," Brandenberg, who also recorded the audio of his subjects, said.
Familiar with local culture, the parallels he found between the devastated victims in Louisiana were enlightening and unexpected.
"With South Philly, there is so much pride and in the neighborhood there is pride with people being from South Philly," Brandenberg said. "They have family for generations and generations [in South Philly] and, if they had to be evacuated from there for any reason, they would want to come back to the same place."
Brandenberg went to Jenkintown’s Abington Friends School before moving to the University of Pittsburgh.
"I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got there. I changed from a psychology major to a film studies to a photojournalism major ’cause all the math you have to do scared me away [from psychology]," he said with a laugh. "I just decided I’m going to be a photo major because this is really what I wanted to do."
Upon graduation in ’98, Brandenberg moved back to his hometown, but claimed, "I don’t know why I came back."
His move to the Review was much clearer.
"I was walking down South Street one day and it was on somebody’s doorstep and I picked it up," Brandenberg said about first spotting the 62-year-old publication.
Brandenberg pitched the editor and immediately began building his connections with everything and everyone South of South.
"People would see me around and they remembered me. It’s a small community, geographically small," Brandenberg said. "I was always in the same neighborhoods and people are always outside of their houses and stuff."
He did all sorts of assignments, learning the ins and outs of the area by capturing its soul on film.
"I really remember well one of the waitresses at the Oregon Diner [302 Oregon Ave.]. We were doing the Eagles playoffs one year, we were covering people in Phillies’ and Eagles’ jerseys and the diner waitress was putting her finger up in the air," Brandenberg said of the We’re No. 1 image that has resurfaced multiple times in the Review. "And it showed her spirit, and her South Philly spirit was so clear in that picture.
"I’m not a huge sports fan, but it was the stuff around Philly sports fans: It was always easy to find and really interesting."
Since leaving his permanent gig at the Review for the university photographer position at Temple — where he is getting a master’s in documentary — his subjects have changed, but his focus remains the same.
"The people will always be my primary subject. It’s a chance for you to tell the story of somebody else," Brandenberg said. "What I found when I was down [in Louisiana] is somebody was so grateful someone outside New Orleans and outside the Gulf Coast was interested in telling their story."
Deeply moved by the images that floated north in the Katrina aftermath, Brandenberg packed up his equipment and headed South. What he found was a ravaged population, but not a conquered one.
"There was nobody living there when I went in 2006, like it had never been cleaned up, nothing had been taken away," he said. "After I went the first time, I came back with footage and I was interested in the possibility to build on it and it’s what drove me back two more times."
The photos spanning ’06 to ’09 chronicle the strengthening of the spirit that never left the Ninth Ward. These powerful moments will be seen Nov. 5 at 230 Vine St. The book is just shy of $50 and Brandenberg is working on a print-on-demand option for it.
"I felt a lot of people were forgetting about [New Orleans] and I never forgot what I saw. It never sat well with me. It was fading away, the memory, for a lot of people," he said. "Doing this really helped me figure out what kinds of work I want to do now, what matters to me."
Though his next ideas are still nebulous, capturing stories will undoubtedly be his life’s work. The passion — and personal finances — he poured into "Roots Run Deep Here" solidified his commitment.
"It’s not that I can make a huge difference, but I felt like it was a way I could contribute," Brandenberg said.
For more information on the First Person Festival Salon du Festival, call 267-402-2055 or visit http://firstpersonfestival.com.
