Photographer Lloyd Wolf recently scanned a set of photographs of the Columbia Heights West Street Festival, which took place in Tyrol Hill Park in May 2001.
This photographs of this festival are the beginning of the process that grew into the current Columbia Pike Documentary Project. CPDP co-founder Paula Endo, and her students from the Columbia Heights West Teen Photo Project, also participated that day.
This neighborhood is the most ethnically-diverse, heavily immigrant section of the Columbia Pike corridor, and this celebration of the community occurred at what the photographer guesses to be the time when the area was at its most diverse.
Participation in this singular celebratory event began the process of awareness, thinking, connecting, and commitment that grew out of the Teen Photo Project's work, and into the current multi-year, multi-artist effort that continues to document our community.
Some time afterward, Paula and Todd Endo met with Lloyd Wolf, and discovered they had related visions and hopes. Plans were drafted, grants were written, photographers, oral historians, and other collaborators were brought in, and the process began.
Two of the Teen Photo Project's graduates, Duy Tran and Xang Mimi Ho, are now integral members of the CPDP photography team.
Pictured are representatives of numerous Somali, Ethiopian, Central American, North African, Chinese, Bolivian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Palestinian, Korean, African-American, and other groups that had settled in and began sharing life along Columbia Pike. The pride and joy in their expressions of self and culture were, to this photographer, very moving; worthy of thorough examination, of sharing, and of recording for posterity.
Photography by Lloyd Wolf
Technical note: All images were scanned from the original color negatives.
