As a sociologist and photographer, I am interested in exploring places and how they help illuminate important questions about how we live. In so doing, I often seek to express aspects of place that extend beyond the immediate visual moment: its history, its place in personal experience, its socioeconomic position.

But we all interpret the world through particular systems of meaning and understanding. Whether guided by social scientific theories or personal experiences, we bring interpretive frames into the world with us. These frames guide us as we determine whether a street is safe or a home feels welcoming, but they also train us to ignore much of what is around us. Consequently, thoughtfully viewing the world requires regularly challenging these interpretive frames with outside perspectives.

To that end, I am interested using the opportunity of this commission to challenge my interpretive frames by stoking a series of discussions about urban social problems with the funder or a person of the funder’s choosing. These conversations would be the basis for a reframing of the issue and the initiation of a small body of work about the subject.