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WHO'S THERE: AVOCA STREET
Before this project, I knew few of my neighbors on Avoca Street, where I have lived for four and a half years. Avoca Street is a one-third mile long residential block located between Linda Rosa and Oak Grove Drive, on the eastern edge of Eagle Rock in Los Angeles. Most of my past work involves photographing anonymous people in public settings around LA and in other cities. I wanted to make photographs that required closer interactions with my subjects, without necessarily evoking the clichés of intimate portraiture. Since I had a son a year and a half ago, I have spent much more of my time at home and around the neighborhood. I set out to create a structure that would bring me face to face with these people‹my neighbors‹who are geographically accessible, and yet mysterious. "Who's There" is a series of these portraits. I conducted photo shoots in April and May of 2006, after canvassing the neighborhood for subjects and meeting with responses ranging from enthusiastically supportive to overtly suspicious. Each piece is a composite of just a few stills out of hundreds. Subjectively, the narratives are about my fascination with a sort of visible tension in people between the strange and the banal. I also do feel that the images reveal something specific about each subject's being, and a trace of the spirit of our interaction. This work is partly a performance inquiry into the question of whether a neighborhood is really a community, particularly in a city like Los Angeles. It's also about the funny details you can unearth in a relatively quiet neighborhood, and about privacy and thresholds of comfort in my relationship with the virtual strangers who allowed me into their personal spaces. Working on this project raised two important questions for me: is it possible or even desirable to know your neighbors? And, is it possible to gain any deep understanding of a subject through photography?  
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