Meet Chelsea Foster of RADDISH: Radical Dishes Cooperative in South Atlanta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chelsea Foster.

Chelsea, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My story is kind of a two-parter, as I have two main loves: photography and RADDISH. They are largely unrelated, except perhaps for the fact that I spend nearly all of my free time working on one or the other. Photography is my craft, whereas RADDISH is my activism.

My work with RADDISH began in the fall of 2016, shortly after I moved back to Atlanta upon graduating from Emerson College up in Boston. A friend invited me out to what she called a “vegan cook night” at her house, and after that first night, I was hooked.

For context, RADDISH stands for Radical Dishes Cooperative, and our mission is to provide nutritious, home-cooked vegan meals to queer homeless youth in Atlanta, as well as doing general advocacy work for various marginalized groups, such as the homeless and the incarcerated. We host cook nights every Wednesday at 7:30 pm at different kitchens around the city, where all are welcome to come volunteer their time and chop some veggies.

Politically speaking, we identify more along the lines of an anarchist organization. That is, we maintain a non-hierarchical structure, with no official presidents or leaders, and we have no affiliations with any political parties, candidates, etc.

Simply put, we have a two-pronged organizational structure: there are the volunteers who attend our events and help us do the hands-on work that is essential in order to deliver the food and supplies; and there are the organizers who do the behind-the-scenes work to make those events happen. Anyone who wants to step up and take on more responsibility within the organization is welcome to do so, and anyone who needs a break from organizing is always given the space they need. So it is a constantly shifting balancing act of responsibility, which of course can be challenging, but is still the most equitable and practical structure for us.

I became an organizer at a particularly turbulent time for RADDISH — many of the original organizers were stepping back in order to pursue professional and academic opportunities in other states or other countries, and the future of RADDISH seemed very unclear. The few remaining organizers took a brief hiatus to regroup — all the while continuing to deliver weekly meals — and with the overwhelming support of our dedicated volunteers, we rallied!

In hindsight, it’s clear that rough patch was one of the best things that could have happened for the organization — it forced us to reevaluate our goals for RADDISH, and now we’re so much stronger and more focused for it. Just last month, we hosted our 2nd annual fundraiser fest at The Bakery Atlanta. It was an all-day event with a stacked lineup of local musicians, artists, creatives, and vendors, and it was a huge success! Now we’re working on get official non-profit status and rebooting our Letters-to-Prisoners project — a collaboration with the organization Black & Pink to support LGBTQIA+ inmates throughout the state of Georgia. So things are looking up, and we’re all very excited to see what the new year has in store for us!

As for the photography story — Perhaps a funny, though not super relevant introduction: Throughout my entire childhood, I knew I was destined be a performer. I always wanted to be in the spotlight, whether that meant singing, dancing, acting, magic tricks, comedy… Any opportunity to wow an audience, I was all over it.

That dream died pretty abruptly around the time I started high school. Coincidentally or not, the death of this dream occurred shortly after I suffered a severe head injury from falling off a skateboard. It was a classic slip-on-a-banana-peel kind of wipe out: my feet flew out from under me and I smacked the back of my head on the pavement. The result was a gnarly concussion and a fractured skull, but with a dangerous amount of bleeding inside the brain, which is apparently much scarier than a head busted open.

The fall had done such a number on my equilibrium that I couldn’t walk for the first couple of days, and altogether I was in the hospital for about a week. It was a very unpleasant experience, but I made a full recovery. It couldn’t have been more than a couple months later when I first asked to borrow my mom’s new 8-megapixel Panasonic digital camera. She hardly ever used it, so I eventually just adopted it as my own, and it quickly became an extension of my arm — I never left the house without it. I’m sure I gave her a name — I used to name all of my inanimate objects back then. It was probably something along the lines of “Gertrude” or “Esther” or “Prudence.” We went everywhere together.

I have since moved on to bigger and better cameras, but the compulsive need to document everything around me, the habit of bringing a camera literally everywhere — that much hasn’t changed in over a decade. And it all started after the fall, so to speak, back in the summer of 2008.

So my mother — who knows nothing about anatomy or medical science — maintains this theory that the impact of the fall may have actually stimulated something in my brain. After all, the visual cortex is located at the back of the head — the very spot where my skull made contact with the sidewalk. She insists that the timing of my interest in visual arts cannot simply be a coincidence, given the nature of the injury. I’m not totally convinced, but it’s a fun theory, so I just go with it whenever she tells the story at dinner parties and family gatherings.

So, since the age of 14, photography has been the thing that people know me for. I still maintain the belief that I was only invited to parties in high school to serve as the behind-the-scenes photographer for the cool kids. Still, drunk photography, for lack of a better term, has always been an interest of mine. I find alcohol and the effects it has on the body and mind endlessly fascinating. The joke I often make is that I don’t know how to take pictures of people unless I’m sloshed. If you look at my body of work, you’ll see that I’m not really joking — there is a pretty significant dichotomy within my portfolio that could if you’re the reductive type, be boiled down to drunk photography and sober photography. The “drunk” shots are all portraits, whereas the “sober” work is almost completely devoid of people. It was never my conscious intention to create such a divided body of work, though I suppose you could argue, as a friend suggested to me recently, that the division in my photos is a reflection of my personality — my social self versus my antisocial self.

In my antisocial work (if that’s what we’re calling it now), I am drawn to trash and decay — objects and places that have been abandoned or discarded. Conveniently, these kinds of settings don’t attract many visitors, so I usually have them all to myself. The wandering can be almost meditative for me. Studying the details, inventing histories in my mind of these places in their prime. Kind of like that scene in The Titanic when the algae-covered, underwater boat interior of modern-day dissolves to reveal the vibrant, bustling interior of the ship in 1912. Except I love the algae. The kudzu, the weeds, the thickets of vines that can consume a whole car in a matter of days in the summertime. These places have a surreal, almost post-apocalyptic quality to them — a tribute to the arrogance and impermanence of manmade things.

I don’t have a concrete answer as to why I always find myself coming back to these kinds of subjects. Maybe it started as a way for me to challenge myself. After all, it’s fairly easy to make a pretty picture of a pretty thing — flowers, kittens, attractive people, etc. So I think it’s always a good exercise to take something that is generally considered ugly or unpleasant to behold — garbage, roadkill, filth — and try to find some beauty in it.

The solitude is a big draw for me too. Though I’m always eager to make new photographer friends, it is unsurprisingly uncommon for me to find folks who want to join me in my trespassings at crumbling buildings or my strolls through the swamp. But I’m okay with that. And anyway, I’m reluctant to have anyone tag along if there’s a chance the destination might be unsafe, which it almost always is. Hell, one of the last times I went out wandering with a friend, we accidentally stumbled upon a very malnourished llama and I wound up in a shouting match with a cowboy-looking man who had a gun pointed at my face. It was my 24th birthday.

That was easily the most absurd situation I’ve found myself in, but everything turned out fine — nobody got shot, and Fulton County Animal Services took care of the poor llama (yes, the curious incident of the llama and the cowboy took place inside Atlanta city limits, not out in the boonies as one might assume). Most of the time though, I don’t encounter any people on my walkabouts, and on the rare occasions when I do, the interactions are almost always cordial, if not amicable. I do a decent amount of research about these locations before I actually go to them — you can learn a lot about a place from the birds-eye-view of Google Earth. I make sure the buildings aren’t occupied, legally or otherwise — the last thing I want to do is intrude on someone’s home. I find a safe place to park, a way in (to the building, property, etc.), and an emergency exit route if one is available.

This practice of sneaking into abandoned buildings is certainly nothing new. In fact, there is already an established term for it: Urban Exploration, or UrbEx for short. I’m under the impression that most major cities have their own underground clubs for these kinds of illicit activities. I have yet to find Atlanta’s UrbEx scene — if one even exists anymore — though I’ll admit I haven’t searched that hard for it. I like to think that my process is a bit different from your typical UrbExer’s, though I guess I can’t know for sure until I actually meet one. From the bit of googling I’ve done on the subject, I have gathered that it’s more of a thrill-seeker’s club, a collective of graffiti artists and adventurers who get a kick out of learning about a city’s history hands-on, through trespassing. Many of them do photograph their exploits, which is where you get a lot of those HDR, fisheye images of crumbling train depots and abandoned mental hospital interiors. I do have an appreciation for this kind of photography — UrbEx photos have been very helpful to me in my research of potential shooting destinations. But I have a feeling that the Urban Exploration scene operates at a pace too fast for me, and is probably a bit of a boys club anyway. I’m no good at hopping fences or outrunning security guards — I just like to study the places and things people leave behind.

Like most millennial photographers, I imagine, my introduction to photography started with a digital point-and-shoot camera. Growing up, digital was all I knew, and it was the convenient, obvious choice for a young photographer on a budget. It wasn’t until I got to college that I had the chance to work with film and that completely changed the game for me. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of months into my first film photography class when I sold my DSLR on Craigslist. I fell in love with the darkroom my freshman year and never looked back.

I have since devoted the entirety of my professional life (which is admittedly somewhat short; I am only 25) to working with film: first at my college darkroom, then at my local film lab in Boston, and now at an analog media archiving company in Atlanta. I was generally pretty terrible at the maths and sciences in school, but there’s something about the chemistry of the developing process and the science of making an exposure on light-sensitive emulsion that makes perfect sense to me. It’s a dying industry, I know, but I feel pretty lucky to be a part of it while I still can.

Going through airport security with all my old cameras and film is always fun. I’m that annoying person who asks for a hand-check because x-rays can damage film. And without fail, every time I’m waiting at the stainless steel table while some poor TSA employee tests each individual roll for traces of explosives, a mom walks by with her Gen-Z kids and says “Look, honey! That’s film. Fiiilm. That’s how people used to take pictures before iPhones.”

So I guess you could say I’m a purist now, which sounds kind of gross to say out loud. But learning the analog process truly taught me everything, forced me to understand how an image is actually made. Because it is made — a picture exposed on film is a real, tangible thing you can hold in your hand. Film emulsion is a liquid substance you can buy in a bottle and paint onto practically any surface. An image on film is the product of multiple chemical reactions, not just a series of ones and zeroes stored on an SD card that may very well become corrupted tomorrow.

I’ve always been very resentful of all the money and time I wasted shooting digitally. Years ago, during that first college photo course I took, I had this incredibly humbling moment while learning to use my 35mm SLR: I realized I didn’t actually understand the relationship between aperture and shutter speed. I had been calling myself a photographer for years, yet I didn’t even know how to make a proper exposure. My Rebel t2i had been doing all the work for me. There I was in the middle of the Boston Common, holding this heavy ass Canon fTb circa 1971 — a camera made almost entirely of metal, with no automatic functions — and I couldn’t figure out how to use the damn thing.

Of course, I can’t speak to anyone else’s process — digital is the better, more practical option for lots of people — but learning photography the analog way was the turning point for me where taking pictures went from being a hobby to being a craft.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
For RADDISH, I think our ultimate goal has always been to create an inclusive space/community where anyone can show up and volunteer for as much or as little time as they want, and walk away feeling like they’re apart of something meaningful. Essentially, we want to make activism as accessible as possible for busy people who don’t necessarily have a ton of time or money to donate, but still give a shit and want to fight the power in whatever small way they can.

It’s so easy to feel hopeless these days, with everything that’s going on around the world. And we’re conditioned to believe that the individual is powerless, that there’s nothing I can do to help. So I think it’s really important for communities to have this kind of user-friendly outlet for people who want to be politically active but don’t know how, or care deeply about an issue but aren’t available to volunteer regularly. We want RADDISH to be that space where you can go chop some veggies for 20 minutes and be reminded that there are likeminded people out there who want to feed homeless kids just as much as you do. A choose-your-own-commitment-level space for people who care about LGBT issues, or homelessness, or animal welfare, or the environment, or all of those things!

And I’d say we’ve been pretty successful in that goal, at the grassroots level that we’ve been operating from. In the roughly two and a half years that RADDISH has existed, we haven’t missed a single week of meal deliveries. That translates to nearly 4500 meals served. Of course, there’s always room to expand — and our LLC application was just approved last week so expansion is a much more real possibility now. Next is the 501c3 application to get our nonprofit status, which I’m told is a much longer and more complicated process than the LLC. But we’re in a good place now, and all signs point to more good things to come.

So given that RADDISH is such a grassroots organization run entirely by unpaid volunteers who all have school and jobs and lives to manage, I’d say we’ve done a damn good job of keeping this dream alive. Because success for us just means doing the most we can for people who have the least.

As for photography, success is a tricky word for me. I think a lot of artists and creatives feel that if you’re a working artist making a living at your craft, then that’s winning. That’s the dream, right? Generally speaking, sure, but that’s not necessarily true for me. When you think about professional photographers — people who support themselves by providing photography services — you’re mostly talking about wedding photographers, event photographers, school portrait photographers, etc. These are the kinds of consistent photography jobs that pay the bills, but these are also the kinds of jobs that would be very unfulfilling for me.

Sure, there are some lucky folks out there who are able to earn a living doing exclusively fine art photography — exhibiting work in galleries, publishing books, getting grants from fancy benefactors — and I guess that is the ultimate dream for me. But I’m not ready for that yet, not even close. And anyway, what arts foundation wants to sponsor a photographer who takes pictures of garbage? I get that, and I think it would be unreasonable for me to expect to be at that level this early in my career — I just turned 25 last month. I still have so much wandering and experimenting and learning to do.

So I feel good about where I’m at for now. Maybe for me, the key to success is managing expectations? We can’t all be Annie Leibovitz doing conceptual portraits of cultural icons for Vanity Fair. Of course, if money was no object, I would absolutely be away somewhere pursuing long-term photo series — may be at a trailer park in Myrtle Beach, or camped out in the desert at Slab City — rather than doing the daily grind at my 9-to-5. But capitalism, you know? So success isn’t a word I get too hung up on these days because I would probably drive myself crazy if it was.

Contact Info:

• Website: chelseafosterphoto.com
• Email: raddishatl@gmail.com, Photography email: chelseafosterphoto@gmail.com
• Instagram: @raddish.official, Photography Instagram: @_chelseafoster_
• Facebook: facebook.com/raddish.official

Image Credit:
The two photos of me with my camera were taken by Tyler Lavoie, RADDISH watercolor artwork by Xan Jordan

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