Neighbors - Logan Heights, San Diego 2015
In 2015, I began photographing men and women from Logan Heights, a historically Hispanic and African-American community of San Diego where I lived. After having only recently moved in, I wished to document my neighbors and through them create a portrait of the neighborhood that we now shared. Using a high-resolution medium format camera, I created uniformly lit portraits of shop owners, mechanics, military retirees, the local city councilman and other inhabitants of the neighborhood. I then exhibited the resulting four feet by five prints on the outside of the fence surrounding my home — which was conveniently situated near a well-traveled intersection in the midst of where my subjects live and work.
Through these dramatically enlarged photos, local residents (and later those from all across the city) were able to witness the character of their fellow neighbors in ways with which they could intimately connect and identify. I purposefully did not remove the photos to some far off exhibition space where community members would have been unable to experience them. Instead, the photos lived in the community where they could uplift and honor the people exhibited and, by extension, the entire neighborhood. In that spirit, I decided to name the project Neighbors.