PLEASANT STREET SERIES

While walking down a street in my hometown, many of my childhood friends’ homes are either boarded up or gone and now exist as open lots.  The change of the neighborhood does not stop at physical structures, but includes race, age, socioeconomics, a community’s identity/culture, its aspirations and relationships.  At the end of my walk down the street and memory lane, I realized that the neighborhood where I grew up no longer exists.  New stories lay atop mine.  This is nothing new in and of itself.  I accept my insider/outsider perspective created by my relationship to a place that lives in a time past rather than what is physically present now.  

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In my photo-based prints, I seek to reconcile past and current my thoughts and experiences regarding these separate yet overlapping places about my childhood neighborhood.  I do this by taking childhood photos and transposing them atop current houses in the neighborhood.  As such, I am attempting to have a conversation about:  What are the new stories alive and here now?  Who is telling these new stories?  In what ways do they differ from mine?  What, if anything, remains from years ago that resonates with what now exists?  Or, are stories and experiences parallel to the point where one longtime resident said, “I feel like a stranger in my own neighborhood."