For Med student photographer, art heals

Second-year Medical student Rebecca Jaffe feels that sometimes art can be the best medicine.

Her photography exhibit -- on display at the Graduate Student Center until March 10 -- was created with that in mind.

Jaffe spent last summer working with adolescents in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia and documenting her experience.

The exhibit features photos of the children from the shelter doing activities she helped organize over the summer.

"I got to spend a summer while in medical school not doing research, hanging out with kids and taking pictures -- something I didn't get to do while I was studying," Jaffe said.

The seven-week program in which she participated was sponsored by Bridging the Gaps, an organization that trains health and social-service professional students to do community service projects.

The organization then sent Jaffe and Penn Dental student Yedeh Ying to Travelers Aid Philadelphia, a homeless shelter in West Philadelphia.

At Travelers Aid, Jaffe worked with 20 to 50 people each day in the teens' program. She helped run a "summer camp" program for the homeless adolescents in the program.

"For me it was this idea that there was something really important to be gained just by hanging out with the kids and getting to know them ... and for them to get to know other people who live different lives," Jaffe said.

Activities she organized for the teens included basketball games, health-education sessions, trips to Penn's campus and a peach-picking trip, the subject of much of Jaffe's photography.

"Anything we did with them at all was good because otherwise they would be doing nothing," she said. "We tried to mix in as much [as we could] to fill the time in the summer and make it worthwhile."

Jaffe -- who studied fine arts as an undergraduate at Brown University -- initially wanted to do a large-scale art project with the teenagers.

"The idea that you can use art to build community and express things that you don't necessarily need to talk about, I think is very valuable," she said. "I thought it really did play into the ideas of community medicine."

But after starting work at Travelers Aid, she realized that a large project would not be feasible in that type of environment.

"It's really hard to walk into any social-service agency as an outsider, especially when working with kids," Jaffe said.

Instead, she decided to take pictures of her charges throughout the summer.

"I got to take a lot of pictures of them hanging out and being themselves," Jaffe said.

Jenny Ko, a student in Penn's School of Design, said that the goal was to have the photographs in a common place to help promote the program.

Ko is an Arts and Cultures fellow at the Graduate Student Center who helped organize the exhibit.

"We were interested in what the program was -- that graduate students were doing something outside the University and helping the community, " she said.

Jaffe is the first student to display art work at the Graduate Student Center that is not from the School of Design, said Jack Lewis, director of the Office of Diversity and Community Outreach for the School of Medicine.

"People get trapped into thinking that graduate students are one-dimensional," he said. "This is a great example of how multi-faceted they are."

Jaffe "is setting a new trend," and the exhibit has been generating good feedback, he added.

But for Jaffe, it was all about the experience she had with the kids.

"The most valuable thing of the summer was the personal relationships," she said.

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