Know your Neighbors: The Southwest Harlem Project is exactly what it sounds like—an opportunity to get to know one's neighbors better through the lens of the camera. It is a project that weaves multiple portraits together to create one comprehensive portrait; a temporal, evolving snapshot, an up-close detail of who we are at this transitional moment in time, here in southwest Harlem. It is street based and relationship based, a collaboration between neighbors to photographically get to know one another, but to also personally get to know one another. In its inception, it was inspired by a comment that my husband’s grandfather always makes to us “younger generation”… He looks at my husband as seriously as possible and says, “Boy, don’t you know your neighbors?” I’ve attempted to take this principle from back home in our small town and apply it to the privilege of living here in Harlem at this moment in history.



All works are untitled, but are titled under Know your Neighbors: The Southwest Harlem Project. Each Photograph is 13x19, digitally inkjet printed, created in 2008, and is a part of the whole. Although works may stand alone as individual portraits, the meaning of the work comes in its entirety. It is considered one piece, one portrait.