Conversations Between the Tables: Photographing Etna Heart & Soul
My blog has been pretty heavily focused on music and performance lately, but I was recently reminded of the power photography can have in a community setting, as well.
A recent Etna Heart & Soul event brought residents together for an evening centered around conversation, reflection, and community feedback focused on the future of the borough. Rather than feeling like a formal presentation or public meeting, the atmosphere throughout the evening felt far more personal and conversational. At every table, discussions naturally drifted between memory and possibility. Someone would mention a long-gone business, a familiar street corner, or a neighborhood tradition, and moments later, the conversation would shift toward what residents hope Etna can continue to become in the future. And there is a lot of momentum in that growth. There’s a new community center scheduled for ribbon cutting later this year, a brewery that opened in March of 2024, and many new restaurants and other businesses that have opened throughout the borough in recent years.
The event, titled A Taste of Etna, featured dinner from several new and long-standing Etna restaurants and caterers, including:
After dinner and throughout the evening, participants contributed handwritten reflections, responses, and ideas connected to themes including identity, belonging, local businesses, walkability, public spaces, community events, and future growth. Many of those conversations unfolded simultaneously across the room, creating an environment that felt less like a structured event and more like a living snapshot of how residents currently see their community.
Because Etna is also my own community, photographing the event carried a very different perspective than a typical assignment. Much like the Be My Neighbor Day event I photographed here last summer, the work became less about simply documenting attendance and more about observing the interactions that reveal how people connect to a place over time.
My role throughout the evening included the documentary-style event photography and environmental coverage of the activities taking place throughout the room, but I was also asked to create portraits of residents that will eventually appear alongside personal memories and anecdotes in a community memory book connected to the project.
Photographing people while they were actively reflecting on memory, identity, and community created a very different dynamic than a standard headshot session, even though the lighting and equipment were technically built for that kind of traditional portraiture. Some residents stepped in front of the camera still carrying the emotion of conversations they had just finished moments earlier. Others laughed with neighbors between portraits or continued conversations while waiting nearby. Even the Etna Garden Club (who sponsored a raffle of several donated baskets of goods) stepped in for a group shot. The result felt much more personal and connected, much like the feel of the event as a whole.
Throughout the evening, similar ideas resurfaced repeatedly across different conversations and activities. Residents spoke openly about wanting Etna to continue evolving while still maintaining the sense of familiarity and connection that has defined the borough for many of the people who live there. Discussions surrounding local businesses, development, public gathering spaces, and community events consistently circled back to the importance of preserving that sense of belonging even as the community changes over time.
Those ideas also revealed themselves visually throughout the event itself. Neighbors leaned across tables comparing memories and perspectives. Handwritten notes slowly accumulated across poster boards and worksheets throughout the room. Small reactions and interactions often carried just as much meaning as the larger organized discussions happening around them. Photographing the evening became an exercise in paying attention to those quieter moments while balancing broader event coverage with more intentional portraiture and visual storytelling.
Projects like this always remind me that photography can serve a purpose beyond simply documenting attendance or recording what happened during a single event. When paired with personal stories, community feedback, and shared experiences of community members who care deeply about their hometown, documentary photography becomes part of a larger effort to preserve that very local identity and create a record of how a community understands itself at a particular moment in time.
The event also reinforced how much community-based creative work develops through ongoing relationships over time. I’ve worked with several of the organizers involved in Etna Heart & Soul on previous projects, and those connections also led to a new opportunity during the event itself to create headshots for the newly formed Pittsburgh chapter of the Women’s International Network of Utility Professionals, coming up next month. Experiences like that are also a reminder of how creative work at the local level is built gradually through familiarity, trust, and continued collaboration, and over time can grow organically to a much larger scale.
By the end of the evening, every table was covered in handwritten reflections, ideas, concerns, and memories contributed by residents throughout the night. Long after dinner ended and the conversations quieted, those pages remained scattered throughout the room like fragments of a collective snapshot: a record of how the community currently sees itself, what it values most, and what residents hope Etna can continue to become moving forward.
