The streets wrote the story.

If you knew me, none of this would be surprising. I have always held the great street photographers in the highest esteem. Robert Frank, Mary Ellen Mark, Bruce Davidson, Vivian Maier, and Bruce Gilden immediately come to mind. I spent years admiring what they found out there, so it was probably only a matter of time before I picked up my camera and went looking to find myself.

I did not feel separate from the people I photographed. I respected them and often recognized something of myself in them. For that brief moment, we were simply human beings sharing the same piece in time.

It started in 2016 when I made a photograph on a side street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A young man walking past me, crying with a cell phone up to his ear. Something about it felt different. It felt like a true street photograph, and apparently that was all the encouragement I needed.

For roughly one year, from September 2016 to September 2017, I continued with my regular work, but nearly every free hour belonged to the street. I was out there, walking mile after mile, day and night, with my little Fuji XC7 camera. I traveled from one city to another looking for heat, life, and those moments that would be gone almost as soon as I saw them.

Most of the pictures led nowhere. That is part of making photographs. But every so often, one picture led to another, and before long I wasn’t looking for the work anymore. The work was leading me. I have felt that happen several times in my life, but never as powerfully as I did during that year.

Somewhere along the way, the streets began bringing back memories of growing up in East Boston. People, places, and stories long forgotten started returning. Before long, those memories and the photographs became part of the same thing. I can’t separate them now, and I’m not sure I would want to.

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