On a large white screen, a projector illuminates the faces of two young men. Their expressions inhabit a small square on their USC student IDs. The violent, stereotypical names on the IDs present the image’s inescapable message – the racial ignorance that divides the students.
The image of the two student IDs provides a mirror to Hiram Sims’ poem, “The University of South Central – My First White Friend, His First Black Friend, Freshman Year.” Sims said the poem, like many others he writes, takes interest in the social complexities that mark the South Los Angeles area.
In visually drawing from his hometown of South Los Angeles, Sims uncovered a synthesizing process that he calls “photoetry,” or the interaction between photography and poetry. This concept inspired the 43 poems and their corresponding photographs in his 2013 book “Photoetry: Poetry and Photography from South Central L.A.,” which he will be discussing in a book talk Thursday in the Bunche Center Library.
Having attended USC as an undergraduate, Sims said he observed an unsettling distance between his classmates and those living in the neighborhoods just off campus. In 2004, Sims founded the Back 2 the Block mentorship program with the goal of connecting black USC students with young black males in the surrounding community.
“What I’ve always loved about the area that I live in was that it was legendary; what I hated was the way people perceived it that were outside of it,” Sims said. “My endeavor in ‘Photoetry’ was to paint a more beautiful picture, lyrically, of the city itself.”
Sims currently teaches creative writing and composition at several colleges across Los Angeles County, including El Camino College and Long Beach City College, but he continues to feel a strong connection to South Los Angeles. It was during his undergraduate years at USC that he attended an art show by Azikiwe Andrews, another Los Angeles-based artist, that the vision for “Photoetry” began. Sims aspired to exhibit his poems, like Andrews’ visual art, with a wall display.
“The job of art in my opinion is not only to express something but to inspire more art to be creative,” Sims said. “The way Azikiwe displayed that art made me feel like I could do it.”
Five years after Sims’ initial conception of “Photoetry,” he began displaying his work in art exhibits with the help of his wife, Charisse Sims. Sims said after he experienced success at the exhibits, he decided he would formalize the poems and photographs to be published in a book.
Sims invited the creativity of five photographers from the Los Angeles area to shape the project’s aesthetic. Sims came to them with 50 of his poems and requested that they bring 50 of their own images. He told them to decide which of his poems evoked imagery, and to capture those images in South Los Angeles. Similarly, Sims wrote poems for the photographs that he felt evoked language.
“In the book, the poems and photos are competing with each other for the attention of the viewer,” Sims said. “The poems, if I may personify them, are cognizant of the fact that people are often more interested in the pictures than they are the words.”
Sims said the artists respected a veto policy in the process – if a photographer felt that Sims’ poem did not accurately reflect his or her image, or if Sims disagreed with how a photograph reflected his poem, the photo or poem would not move forward.
Photographer Ameer Espy said that in the early processes of “Photoetry,” he did not expect for the project to eventually become a book. He said he was pleasantly surprised at the book’s success.
“A lot of my inspiration came from the fact that it was my good friend’s vision,” Espy said. “When (Sims) painted the picture for me, it was easy.”
Paul Von Blum, a senior lecturer of African American studies and communication studies, who will be introducing Sims at the book talk, wrote a chapter about art in the African American studies department’s anthology “Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities.” Dawn Jefferson, the Bunche Center’s special projects and board coordinator, said students can expect to hear a bit about Von Blum’s work in the anthology and experience Sims reading his poetry with the corresponding photographs projected on the wall.
“‘Photoetry’ is such a wonderful combination of the visual and the written,” Jefferson said. “We have a wonderful campus, but we hope it will give students a sense of what’s outside the campus and the community.”
Sims, who currently lives in South Los Angeles with his family, said “Photoetry” continues to inspire him because of the way in which communities, both within and beyond South Los Angeles, connect with the book.
“There is complexity in the experience of being in South Central, and that the people who are here have chosen to be here,” Sims said. “There is love, joy, suffering, struggle, just like I believe there is in every community.”