NASW Rhode Island 50th Anniversary Project

Several months ago I was having a conversation with Ann Bellotti, a peer, friend, and past supervisor when I was in graduate school at Rhode Island College School of Social Work. Ann has been an active within RI NASW and was explaining to me the upcoming plans for a special event, a “gala”, to celebrate the 50th anniversary, not of RI NASW’s first beginnings but of its available recorded history. One thing led to another and I found myself offering to help with the photography that would somehow add to the celebration. After speaking with my photography mentor, Cemal Ekin, a few ideas were formulated which led to meeting with a Gala committee members. It was decided that NASW, through their webpage, would ask Social Workers to volunteer to have their photo taken that hopefully would be put into a video slide show for the Gala. Someone NASW resurrected an old RI license plate that belonged to Kate Coyne-McCoy, past NASW President whose plate read “NASW 1”. The plate would be carried to each photo shoot and held by all having their photo taken. The first photo shoot as it turned out was to be one the would emulate the cover of the “Abbey Road” album. It took some emailing back and forth before this shoot was ready to go and for me, this turned out to be the most fun.

Ann Bellotti had contacted the three colleges that have Social Work curriculum and arranged for me to photograph their social work students. Acquiring photos of practicing Social Workers proved difficult as available time and location coordination presented barriers yet in the end it got done. Many hours went into digitally processing the images and sorting them in proper order trying to be diligent to not include duplicates in the final version of the video slideshow. As seen below the video is here for your viewing. You can watch it in the format provided as well as right clicking on the four arrows on the bottom left of the viewing screen, next to the work VIMEO. This will bring the video to “full screen”. You will notice you loose some sharpness. You can get out of full screen viewing by hitting the “esc” key. I hope you enjoy it.

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The purpose of taking the original photos was present some sort of video, the end result being the video above here. Somewhere in the process of doing the photography and discussing the video it was thought that the photos could be presented in such a way to make up a poster of photos. Here again I relied on my mentor Cemal Ekin, his website is well worth your time to visit. After deciding on the size of the poster we concluded the photos size to be 2″ x 3″ which eventually led to making a change in the dimensions of the poster to 24″ x 36″, coincidentally a 2 x 3 format. The entire poster structure was designed in Photoshop after which all it took was to click and drag the processed photos into their respective showcase. NASW RI came up with a 50th year reunion logo which was incorporated into the poster making it a “Commemorative” work. Here is the final product.

Here are the individual photos that made up the commemorative poster.