VIScom: photo safari/line study pairings round 2

curvilinear study
facade of bartle hall downtown









angular study
office building downtown

mural southwest boulevard
angular study









one of my favorite projects so far, simply because i love my city.  i've always looked forward to opportunities to represent my hometown, and these photo safaris are a great excuse to shed some light on the subtle beauties of kansas city.

interestingly, i actually had a very eye-opening experience shooting around southwest boulevard.  there was a piece of graffiti in the frame of a picture i was taking.  lining it up, a random guy walking down the street stopped me and asked me to not take a picture of the graffiti because it was a gang tag.  evidently within the week there had been a murder in the neighborhood, and these tags had gone up around the area as a sort of a stamp of authority.  he thought that by showing these them, it would be disrespectful to the families and the neighborhood as a whole.  he wasn't mean about it, but almost sad.

while we were talking, a gentleman who was working in the garage with the above virgin mary mural walked out.  the three of us talked about the history of the neighborhood.  though it has its quaint restaurants and bright colored facades, the neighborhood has had a lot of problems with crime and poverty over the last couple of decades.  in the 50s, southwest boulevard was a largely middle/lower income irish-catholic neighborhood with its own problems.  there was a large influx of mexican families over the next couple of decades.  according to the people i met, because of citizenship issues and other things, employment was near impossible for these families to come by.  to make do, the kids starting selling drugs.  while it might have immediately put food on the table, it sunk the neighborhood into a cycle of poverty and violence that it hasn't really been able to pull out of since.


the guy walking down the street was one of the people who brought his family to the neighborhood in the 70s.  the gentleman from the shop had been living in the area since the 50s, so both had a great perspective on how the neighborhood had developed.  i don't know how the project is going to shape up, but i would love to be able to focus on the southwest boulevard neighborhood.  i talked to the guys i met about the project, and they asked me to come by with the finished product.  so maybe there's a little more motivation with the third pairing above to make sure it's the one i get to focus on...