2004 was a big year for me in Boston: I had just returned from a semester in Europe, I was starting to make friendships that would mean more to me than anything ever had, I moved into my first apartment ever, spent my first summer away from Pennsylvania, walked around a lot, really began to feel like Boston was my own. I also took my first black & white photo class at Emerson, and a color photography class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) during the summer. Most of the photos in this collection are from those classes, or from my independent photographic ramblings of the South End, where I lived for most of 2004 and two years afterwards. Where I lived in the South End was an interesting place - right at the edge of the South End proper, the "gay" neighborhood of Boston full of extremely expensive brownstones, before Roxbury, one of the historically poorest and most violent areas of the city. It never ceases to fascinate me how this extreme privelege / extreme poverty side by side contrast seems to exist everywhere you go.

2004

42 pictures (2 contact sheets); 35mm