Photo By Christina Hansen
I have been pestering New York Carriage Driver Christina Hansen for a year or to let us help her buy a full-frame digital camera to take her stunning Iphone photography to another level. Two weeks ago, she finally agreed to let me organize a campaign here on the blog – not on a crowdsourcing site – to raise the $3,000 she needs buy a new Nikon D750 camera.
So here goes, another small act of kindness in a fractured world, another opportunity to do good on behalf of a deserving person.
More than anyone in New York City, Photographer/Carriage Horse Driver Christina Hansen has captured the heart and soul of the horses and people who make up New York’s iconic carriage trade. She was also instrumental in giving the carriage drivers – an embattled, discouraged, disorganized and idiosyncratic collection of free spirits – a voice when they were in great danger of having their work and way of life taken from them.
She has done as much as anyone I know to promote a wiser and more honest understanding of working animals and their role and history in our lives. She is fighting to keep animals in our world.
For years, the carriage drivers were vilified, de-humanized and encircled by some very powerful people who have lost touch with the true nature of working horses and the real lives of animals. And who sought to curb the freedom and property of honest and hard-working people.
For a long time, it seemed almost unthinkable that the carriage trade could survive the brutal and sustained assault by the city’s arrogant mayor, an unyielding millionaire obsessed with banning them, and a coalition of real estate developers and well-funded organizations that coveted their stables and claimed to speak for the rights of the horses. But who lied repeatedly about them and their care and seemed to know nothing about them.
The carriage trade has prevailed, the horses have been saved from great danger. A way of life has been preserved. Christina Hansen has played an enormous role in this. I am indebted to her.
“She was instrumental in saving the carriage trade,” a senior Teamster official told me of her work. “I can’t begin to tell you what a difference she made in getting our story out and in dealing with some of the very difficult politics inside the carriage trade.”
Christina moved to New York City from Philadelphia in August of 2012 to fight for the trade and the idea of working horses, that as been the focal point of her life the past four years. She became the driver’s most articulate and quoted spokesperson. For years, animal rights groups claimed the horses were being starved, overworked,crowded in unspeakable cells, neglected, tortured and abused, choking on city fumes. Reporters who never came near the stables faithfully relayed their grotesque accusations.
Christina worked day and night to rebut lies and distortions and get the truth out. And the truth did get out. New Yorkers overwhelming rejected the movement to ban the horses from the city where they have worked for so many years.
Christina seemed to have had a cell phone tucked into her ear permanently. She was always available to speak for the drivers and defend them. And the photos she began taking evolved continuously, they showed her great love of horses and the people who lived and worked with them. The touched our hearts, connected us to our own humanity and history.
Christina’s photographs painted a very different picture than the one the media and animal rights organizations had been transmitting for years. She used her didactic love of facts and accuracy and the power of her art to show the love and spirit and individuality of one of the oldest professions in the world, and one of the oldest continuous trades in New York.
Photographs cannot lie the way people sometimes can, and her work has always resonated with great power.
She was in terms, insulted, harassed, spat at, followed by informers with video cameras, called ugly and jeered at on the street and as she did her carriage work. She was also exhausted. But she never stopped taking photographs, the mark of the true artist.
Hansen, a co-founder of Blue-Star Equiculture, the carriage trade rescue and retirement farm, gained credibility as a spokesperson for the trade, answering the previously unchallenged charges made against them (the horses couldn’t turn around, they were fed rat-infested food, many were dropping dead of exhaustion, they were relentlessly and cruelly abused.) Her message began to get through, her photos became a testimony to the truth, an antidote for rage and distortion.
Christina talked to reporters, welcomed neighbors and residents and private citizens to the stables, invited people to come see the horses, worked with Teamster Union lobbyists, answered again and again a stream of never-ending and demonstrably false accusations and worked to get the true story of the carriage drivers out to the public. I could not have done the work I did without her assistance.
It was Christina who first invited me to come to New York and see the horses, and who answered my endless questions about them for more than two years, who fought with me, corrected my mistakes, sent me related stories, introduced me to other drivers. We always had a respectful but uneasy relationship, as writers often have with subjects. But it was a very productive relationship.
I came to see Christina as a friend, although we rarely saw one another, and day by day, came to see her enormous and intuitive creativity. She is a member of the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm.
In all that time, in the hundreds of interactions we had, I came to trust and believe Christina. Nothing she ever said to me was exaggerated, false or distorted. She never told a lie or hid the truth from me.
Hansen, 36, is a former history professor and life-long photographer.
(You can contribute to the camera fund in two ways: You can send me a check in any amount payable to Christina Hansen, c/o Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. If you prefer to contribute via Paypal, you can send me a donation via Paypal’s Friends and Family option, please mention that the money is for Christina so I can keep accurate records. My Paypal ID is [email protected])
At heart, Christina is a carriage driver.
“I will have been driving commercial carriages for 10 years this week,” she messaged me yesterday.
“I have had a long-ish interest in photography, having taken an honest-to-gosh black and white film photography class in college,” she wrote, “using my mom’s old Pentax camera, that she used for photojournalism, complete with all the film processing and dark room work. As a present, about 10 years ago, my parents gave me a new lightweight film camera, but that was soon stolen out of our ground floor apartment in Philadelphia, without my ever really having used it. Since then, it’s been a few less great non-DSLR digital cameras and mostly my iPhone for photos.”
She is an artist, her Iphone photographs have captured the humanity and suffering and way of life in the carriage trade, brilliantly, and day after day. She can be aloof.
A shy and sometimes brusque person to meet, her photographs spill over with emotion and feeling. They show the faces of the drivers, the intimate and overlooked relationship between the horses and the city, the powerful relationship between the horses and Central Park which was designed so much for them.
In capturing the soul of the horses and drivers, she has revealed her own.
I know how hard Christina works, how much she cares, how much she had done.
There are fewer things more meaningful that helping an artist to acquire the tools he or she needs to do their work.
Christina is already thinking of a showing at a pop-up art gallery on Ninth Avenue. I can guarantee it will be a beautiful and important show, it will tell the true story of the New York Carriage Horses, a story that has never been told.
The carriage horse controversy has triggered a new social awakening about animals, revealed the derailment and abuse of power of some elements of the animal rights movement, and inspired ordinary working people everywhere to stand in their truth and defy the overreach of government, especially when it is unjust and corrupt.
Christina has helped advance a new and wiser understanding of animals in our world, and in so doing, elevated the very idea of art. Her own transformation mirrors the miraculous rebirth of the carriage trade, just a few years ago written off as doomed.
She is very definitely one of us. She loves animals, she loves creativity, the artist inside of her is crying to come out. And I know how hard she works and how little money she makes.
(You can contribute in two ways: You can send me a check in any amount payable to Christina Hansen, c/o Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. If you prefer to contribute via Paypal, you can send me a donation via Paypal’s Friends and Family option, please mention that the money is for Christina so I can keep accurate records. My ID is [email protected])
The list price of the camera (with a versatile zoom lens) is $2,496.95, I am suggesting at least another $500 for batteries, cables, straps, card readers and the other accessories that are a part of digital photography. Christina cannot do this herself, I am privileged to be able to try to support this project on her behalf. I can’t think of a better use of the blog.
I am learning that we don’t always need a global crowdsourcing campaign, the blog works on this scale, and it also feels more intimate and uplifting for me and the people in this new kind of community. As always, no one should feel any pressure to contribute for any reason other than that they can and wish to. And thanks.