Neighbors
The Neighbors project began with me photographing men and women from a working class Hispanic and African-American community in San Diego. Shooting tightly, usually a mere foot or two away, with a high resolution medium format camera so as to minimize distorted facial features, I created uniformly lit portraits of shop owners, mechanics, military retirees and other inhabitants of the neighborhood. I then exhibited the resulting four feet by five prints on a busy street near where my subjects live and work. 

By photographing so closely and enlarging so dramatically, viewers are able to witness the character of these members of the community in ways with which they can uniquely connect and identify. Taking a cue from French street artist JR, I did not remove the photos to some far off exhibition space. Instead, the photos live in the community where they can uplift and honor the people exhibited and, by extension, the entire neighborhood. 

Furthering my goal of connection, however, I also promoted, through social and traditional media (Voice of San Diego, Pacific Magazine, ABC Channel 10 News), a festive event which brought together people from within and without the area to create an actual physical connecting of people of different races and economic groups. That I was able to both garner publicity and physically integrate people of different ethnicities and social backgrounds with this project has both demonstrated to me the power of public art and motivated me to pursue other opportunities in this vein. 

Since beginning this project in San Diego, I have expanded it through my work with the UK arts organization Edge of Arabia and their Culture Runners program. Traveling with a group of artists from the Middle East, I’ve created hundreds of portraits of Americans as we journeyed from the trendy streets of Brooklyn to the farm towns of Ohio and the challenged-but-thriving urbanity of Detroit. My goal with this work is to again publicly display it in the communities inhabited by my subjects. 

Presently, I’m in the midst of photographing individuals for the the Neighbors project in all 50 states.