Photojournalist Angela Peterson’s work includes six black-and-white prints onto which she hand-painted color, framing a man’s glasses in bright red and applying makeup to the cheeks of the faces she brought to life.
Peterson, a staff writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, spent 15 months capturing images of residents at Milwaukee’s Greentree-Teutonia Apartments as part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University’s Diederich College of Communication.
When doing color work, Peterson applies photographic colors with toothpicks and cotton swabs. Her goal: to highlight details in the portraits she has taken.
In this medium, Peterson brings a different kind of creativity than in typical news photography. It’s a technique she returned to for this project after a roughly 10-year hiatus.
With each image, she thinks about how, for example, the color of a boy’s shirt contrasts with the rust-red, bright white and pink tones of the shirts around him.
These images are gateways to the stories and lives of the people at Greentree.
About the project
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer Angela Peterson spent 15 months at the Greentree-Teutonia Apartments, a public housing complex on Milwaukee’s north side. As part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, Peterson took thousands of photographs, kept a journal, and wrote stories capturing the heartache and triumph of a community that is often overlooked and misunderstood. She was assisted by Marquette students Isabel Bonebrake and Megan Woolard. Marquette University and the program administration had no role in the reporting, editing, or presentation of this project.
Project loans
- Reporter, photographer: Angela Peterson
- Contributing reporters: Alison Dirr, Piet Levy
- Editor: Jill Williams
- Contributing editors: Greg Borowski, Ashley Luthern
- Image editing: Sherman Williams, Berford Gammon
- Editing: Chris Foran, Pete Sullivan
- Assistants to Marquette O’Brien: Isabela Bonebrake, Megan Woolard
- Design: Krista Wilcox, Kyle Slagle
- Social Media: Ridah Syed
