South Philly Review

Ryan Brandenberg stumbled onto the South Philly Review as it lay on a doorstep six years ago. Raised in the Northeast, the area was not his familiar stomping ground, but it would soon become a second home.

"I knew [the area] pretty well, strangely; I just did. I was excited to shoot down there," Brandenberg, who began freelancing for the Review that same year before moving to the staff photographer position a short time later, said. "It's an interesting place. There is a lot to look at.

"I can't explain it, exactly what I mean, because it has attitude. It was South Philly. It was cool."

The gig -- which he continues sporadically as a Review freelancer one more -- brought Brandenberg up close and personal with the community. His time was well-spent, honing his technical skills and engendering an interest in documenting people.

His knack for capturing the innate connection between people and their homes carried into Brandenberg's latest project, "Roots Run Deep Here," a self-published book documenting returning Hurricane Katrina victims of the Ninth Ward.

"Initially, I went nine months after Katrina in May of 2006. And I basically walked around, I met some of the people who were there," the 33-year-old said. "When [the hurricane] first happened, it was unlike anything I had watched before.

"I had never been that moved -- people on the rooftops of their house."

Many visits later, Brandenberg is set to bring his images to a big screen at tonight's First Person Arts Salon du Festival as part of the Painted Bride Art Center's weeklong event. Tickets to the two-hour 6 p.m. event are $15 to $20 and will include works by Jennifer Baker, Stephan Salisbury, Nimisha Ladva and Laura Jean Zito.

"It's an organization that wants to give documentarians and people who work in memoir a stage, " Brandenberg said. "In this case, it's an 18-minute audio slide show of the faces and voices, people I photographed and I recorded.

"It is their testimony."

After a colleague who helped Brandenberg put together his tribute recommended he apply to First Person Arts, the photographer submitted the audio slide show he had created for his Web site, http://www.rootsrundeephere.com/2009/07/.

"It's a continuous track that I put together from snippets. It's selected clips of my interviews with them," Brandenberg, who also recorded the audio of his subjects, said.

Familiar with local culture, the parallels he found between the devastated victims in Louisiana were enlightening and unexpected.

"With South Philly, there is so much pride and in the neighborhood there is pride with people being from South Philly," Brandenberg said. "They have family for generations and generations [in South Philly] and, if they had to be evacuated from there for any reason, they would want to come back to the same place."

Brandenberg went to Jenkintown's Abington Friends School before moving to the University of Pittsburgh.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do when I got there. I changed from a psychology major to a film studies to a photojournalism major 'cause all the math you have to do scared me away [from psychology]," he said with a laugh. "I just decided I'm going to be a photo major because this is really what I wanted to do."

Upon graduation in '98, Brandenberg moved back to his hometown, but claimed, "I don't know why I came back."