Oct., 2000 — A cabbage field in Texas and a rave in San Francisco, a hospital room in New York City and an office in southwest Chicago. These are just a few places some of the country's leading photographers and documentary interviewers visited earlier this year, collecting images and words for something that hopes to change the way we see our communities.

It's a big order for Indivisible, a national documentary project that uncovers grassroots organizations and the people behind them. With $2.4 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, rounded up 12 photographers and ten interviewers to venture into a dozen diverse locales around the country. Cameras and DAT recorders in hand, for 15 to 30 days they gathered stories about individuals concerned with everything from housing and healthcare to youth and immigration.

"If the problems of the community are tackled at the local level, then the solutions will last longer and feel more real. That's the major theme of this project," says Elana Hadler, Indivisible project coordinator at the CDS. "People in these communities are doing incredible work and going against what most people think is happening in America."

We'll find out how this month, when Indivisible kicks off with a nine-museum exhibition tour (beginning with Chicago's Terra Museum of Art, October-November 26), book, free public postcard installations and interactive computer stations, Web site educational programs and archive.

Not everyone is completely convinced of Indivisible's intentions, however. New York State-based photographer Danny Lyon (known for his shots of the civil rights movement, Texas prisoners and bikers) says of his first Indivisible meeting, "I didn't buy all of this grassroots community change kind of thing they were talking about. I'm a very political person, someone who was involved in the political activity from the early Sixties."

Nonetheless, his photos related to Proyecta Azteca are among Indivisible's near 200 black-and-white and color prints. The San Juan (Hidalgo County), Texas organization that teaches migrant farmworkers skills to build and finance their own homes "is a very good thing," he says. "I ended up having a very good time."

But first, he'd break the rules. "I tried to ignore most of what I was told to do. I knew before I went there that most of my photos would not be of the construction of houses." So forget shots of men in hard hats hammering nails into two-by-fours, only two of which are included in the 20 Lyon submitted.

Instead, he photographed the people in a place. The Valley, home to Proyecto Azteca, is a swath of mostly agricultural land that stretched 150 miles from Brownsville along the Rio Grande. The area is "really Mexican, and the people know it. I felt it." He also captured it in his shots of migrants harvesting cabbages and onions and folks of all ages at the weekend dance, a family in a flea market parking lot and a man at a pay phone. Lyon photographed first, then told the interviewer matched up with him where he'd been ("I wanted to do my own thing.").

Sylvia Plachy, however, sometimes worked alongside the interviewer, each taking turns every ten minutes documenting women just before and after giving birth. The Midwifery Practice and Doula Service at University Hospital and Medical Center (Stony Brook University, New York) is an organization of volunteers and health professionals who offer support to women during labor, delivery and early postpartum stages. Of the almost expectant women who passed through during the four months she photographed, Plachy ended up focusing her cameras on just one woman and her husband. "[The Midwifery program] is an enormous idea," she says. "To make it a cohesive unit, it's better to have fewer characters and more subtle nuance between the pictures."

Plachy used her cameras the way she always does, whether shooting for The Village Voice, where she is staff photographer, or for her three books (the latest is Signs & Relics). "When I take pictures, it's a discovery thing," says Plachy. "I explore, visually, what is there."

Hopefully, she'd arrive at the hospital in time for the birth. "You never knew when it would happen, but I was fortunate." Remaining as unobtrusive as possible, she respected a newborn baby's need for dim light by not using a flash (another challenge). And though she nabbed some fast-action, bursting-birth shots, one of her best was taken afterward, of Sunshin and Robert gazing lovingly at their little Olivia.

If that child were a teen in San Francisco, she might know about Youthline, a service of CHALK (Communities in Harmony Advocating for Learning and Kids). Lauren Greenfield, of Los Angeles, photographed volunteers of the youth-run peer-to- peer conversation and crisis-intervention hotline.

Greenfield has been drawn to documenting youth, acutely expressed in her 1997 book, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, interested less in photographing a roomful of kids using telephones and computers, Greenfield concentrated on the project's rich diversity of urban youth and their lives. "Those kids had to be a reflection of the kids they were talking to," she says. "So by following them, I'd get a sense of what was going on in the greater community."

Greenfield spent some time in that room first, getting to know the volunteers. "I tried to focus on the [family, relationship and social] issues that the kids were calling Youthline for," says Greenfield. Then she joined Aya, Cash and Nina at a rave party, Aya in her messy bedroom, and Karen getting her brow pierced for her birthday. It's these kinds of scenes that most of her Indivisible photos capture.

Teens were also subjects for Dawoud Bey (a professor of photography at Columbia College in Chicago) who photographed those involved in the Southwest Youth Collaborative, on Chicago's southwest side, a predominantly black and Latino working- class community. Its youth-driven programs address juvenile offenders and legal issues and include two neighborhood centers.

Bey shot Polaroid portraits, as he's done for eight years. But instead of a 20 x 24 with color that he uses in his studio, he used a 4 x 5 with black and white, photographing in community centers, meeting rooms and offices—"less-than-ideal spaces" he says. Another challenge was times, since he normally works in a "very slow and contemplative way... allowing the subjects a good deal of time in front of the camera," he says.

While time prevented Bey from establishing the kind of intimate relationship with his subjects that he otherwise might have, he didn't think it was a problem. "Photographs are about a moment, and I tried to make the most compelling photographs of the people who were in front of the camera at any given moment that I could," he says.

Representing 12 unique examples of grassroots actions, the images of Indivisible "teach us about our country and what can happen when you dedicate yourself to your community," says Hadler. "Let's let as many people as possible know about this, so that they, too, can be inspired to get involved."