City of Seven Hills

Seven Hills is a ongoing visual and physical pilgrimage of Somerville, Massachusetts, where I live and work. It's my attempt to better understand a rapidly changing city that is the most densely populated municipality in New England.

The City of Seven Hills is a physical survey of Somerville, MA taking shape as pilgrimage and investigation. I’ve resided here longer than any other location since growing up in Southern California, and one day I realized I had somehow built a life, but lacked connection.  Somerville has been known as The City of Seven Hills, and although founders aimed to draw parallels between it and Rome, in truth there were 14 with 28 different names.  It is also the most densely populated municipality in the North East, and has undergone a familiar, but no less radical shift from working-class family homes towards increasing development and an untenable cost of living. The first few years, I didn’t  feel I’d paid enough respect to, or been curious enough about, the place to consider myself a part of it.  Now that I have dived back into an artistic practice in the last year, I’ve been focused on trying to find belonging within the community.  Which is what prompted me to pursue this idea of pilgrimage, to search for a better understanding of space and to learn the city's intricacies and unique elements when it has such a small geographic footprint.  Although not religiously oriented, there is a reverence for the way the world arranges itself and offers itself up if we give it attention.  Additionally, to make small moments with the people that live here - a type of communion.  Photography has allowed me to make connections as I navigate this new chapter in my life, and to embrace an element of vulnerability I so often tried to avoid. 

As I was starting this project, I came across Baldwin’s writing in his and Avendon’s Nothing Personal and was struck by how much a specific section resonated with my recent experience and I think of it often while I’m out working.  Beginning with the devastation of the 4AM hour, and our struggle to choose between annihilation and facing another day, he talks of being ‘driven to find that long-lost friend, to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving, human hand…a human being could only be saved by another human being.  I am aware that we do not save each other very often.  But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time…perhaps between now and that last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle…of coherence and release’ and to move into ‘the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity.’  I think I am seeking something similar through the act of photographing, reaching out blindly and hoping my fingers brush another's.