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| © Lyric Cabral |
| From Cabral's project on elderly residents of the Cecil Hotel in Harlem. Click photo for more images. |
Age: 25
Location: New York City
Website: lightstalkers.org/lyriccabral
Cabral gained impressive access to residents of the Cecil Hotel by cultivating genuine, trusting relationships with them, often involving them in the editing process.
As a sophomore in high school, Lyric Cabral fell in love with photography and its ability to tell the stories of people the media seemed to ignore. Now, at 25, she has created her own photographic essay that does exactly that.
Cabral was living and working in Harlem in February 2006 when she began the project represented here, The Cecil Hotel: Old Habits. Noticing that many of the men in her neighborhood who were visibly addicted to drugs were also senior citizens, Cabral began photographing at the hotel, which houses 89 elderly men and women. For the next 18 months, she gained impressive access to the Cecil Hotel residents by cultivating genuine, trusting relationships with them, often showing them workprints and involving them in the editing process. Her images address not only these "invisible addicts," but the neighborhood's social and economic issues, which continue to plague her subjects well into old age.
In 2005 Cabral was named one of the first recipients of the Jocelyne Benzakin Memorial Fellowship, which pays for students who have completed the International Center of Photography's Community Programs to take a year of classes in its continuing-education program. Her Cecil Hotel project grew out of these classes, and her work has been further informed by the mentorship of photographers Frank Fournier and Joseph Rodriguez, as well as her background in journalism, in which she received a degree from Columbia University.
Although Cabral is still working to get her Cecil Hotel work published and widely exhibited, she continues to pursue her goal of documenting other "stories that the mainstream media evades or misrepresents." Recently she has been photographing wounded Iraq veterans who are also homosexual.
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