MEET YOUR NEIGHBOR

Who are the people who live next door? What are their lives like? What do they care about? These questions inform my Meet Your Neighbor project, in which I find myself inside foreign but familiar homes photographing foreign but familiar faces.

There is a lineage of women being good neighbors whether watching a child or lending a cup of sugar or listening to a story over tea. We each have a story to tell. Meet Your Neighbor is proof that even at a time when divisiveness is heightened, cords of humanity have the power to tie us together. These stories reveal not only my neighbors’ personal histories but a mosaic of what reaching through isolation toward a deeper connection can look like.

The stories and the faces of my neighbors are different, but my process is the same. I ask a question: if you were suddenly forced to flee your home, what is the one object that fits in your hand, that you would take? With a focus on that item, they open. I photograph the objects and record the person discussing that object’s value. Eventually, I take their portrait. Objects contain volumes. Everything from family history, to aesthetic taste, to a difficult memory that we don’t know how to release.

The chosen objects have varied from an umbilical cord to a tequila bottle containing a young boy’s mother’s ashes, to a tiny hand-crafted violin, to a cat's pelt. While holding these items and telling their stories a kind of trust and intimacy forms.

The subjects of Meet Your Neighbor embody kindness, shyness, conservatism, liberalism, and fear. They are living and dying, coming and going. But wherever they are— they’re home and they’ve invited me in. These exchanges give me hope.

Fran, a stroke survivor, watches reruns of Gunsmoke for five hours a day in the same worn chair. Every day at 3:00 pm, she enjoys one beer, which is handed to her by her husband, Bob, who speaks with pride about his Confederate flag. He, too, sat for a portrait.

Kristina lives in a tiny dilapidated “saltbox” a few doors down from me. She has Lyme disease, which prevents her, at times, from working. Her coat closet has a dirt floor with a small hatch that leads underground to the AME Zion church next door, thought by some to be one of twelve tunnels of the Underground Railroad that rests beneath our neighborhood.

Jeanine lived up the hill from me. We met at the gas station where she asked across many cars in a strong South African accent where I'd gotten my highlights done. That exchange started a brief friendship. One day Jeanine unexpectedly took her life. Friends didn’t see the signs. I sent her portrait to her family in South Africa, and soon a new family moved into her pretty home with the door painted lavender.

*Note: Since starting these sessions in 2018, eight of my neighbors have passed away due to old age, COVID-19, cancer, alcoholism, and suicide. I will pick up the project again in December 2024. To date, I have photographed 78 neighbors and have commitments from another 23.