Urban Identities
My photographs explore themes of resilience, impermanence, and the passage of time while documenting the changing landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts.
I think of the centuries of a city’s changing voices and the layering of dialogues that exist between the inner and outer skins of crumbling red brick factory walls from past industrial traditions to the newly scrubbed bricks of restored mill buildings for housing apartments and condominiums.
I see the strength of growth and change in the city’s thriving University and Community College and in the city’s museums, theaters, auditoriums, restaurants, and baseball park. I also recognize the melancholic frailty and the high turnover vacancy rates of shuttered retail spaces and the mundane piling up of wind blown detritus from the city’s past and present occupants collected in canals and concrete corners.
I have my own personal lifelong relationship and generational connections to Lowell. I am also a disconnected outsider with a camera who is seeking to understand my experiences and place amongst the resilience of individuals living in a continually in flux landscape with a complex history of cultural, economic and racial diversity.
