Dave Bullock is a co-founder of the Skid Row Photography Club, which provides digital cameras to Los Angeles’ Skid Row residents — the club’s members — and through their pictures allows outsiders like himself a chance to see their lives in another light. Bullock raises the funds to buy the cameras, and he collects used ones for the project, as well.
“It’s given them, members of the club, an outlet and a way to express themselves artistically and also to document their day-to-day lives,” Bullock said of the club, which he co-founded in 2007 with Skid Row resident and homeless advocate Michael Blaze. “They have access to the community that only someone who is part of the community can have. Any photojournalist or outsider like myself can never hope to capture the stuff that they do. It’s amazing what they get.”
Bullock, a freelance photographer, says when he’s had time, he would spend time with the residents and offer classes on photography, as well as help them organize their photos and create shows. These days, as he juggles several paying jobs including being lead developer at the crowd-funding charitable website CrowdRise and on the faculty at Art Center College of Design, he’s mostly doing fundraising for the club, and Blaze distributes the cameras to the community, working from a list he maintains of people he trusts will put the cameras to good use.
The residents’ photographs have captured a variety of subjects, including ash on the street, piles of trash and even flowers — images visitors to Skid Row might never think to photograph. Some of them have been displayed publicly and have been sold for money.
“They find the beauty of everyday things,” Bullock said.
A Reform Jew who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bullock began to learn about Skid Row when he moved into a nearby neighborhood in downtown L.A. roughly 10 years ago. He and Blaze, whom he met at a gallery exhibition, launched the club with the help of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council.
Most recently, in an effort to purchase additional cameras, Bullock launched an online campaign on CrowdRise that has raised nearly $2,000 for the club. It costs $100 to buy a Canon point-and-shoot camera as well as an 18-gigabyte memory card and a tripod, Bullock said. To date, the club has provided 50 digital cameras to Skid Row community members, Bullock said.
Somehow, he’s also found time to document Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s recent restoration and to serve on the San Bernardino Cave and Technical Rescue Team.
“It is the whole tikkun olam thing,” Bullock said of his volunteer work. “It wasn’t a conscious choice. I didn’t go out and say, ‘I am going to … help out the world,’ but I think it’s part of our culture … tzedakah and all that stuff,” he said. “I think it’s part of our duties to help out any way we can, and I happened to land on a path that has allowed me to do that.”
