Category: People

  • Spring evening, Philadelphia

    (1993)

  • Wailing souls, Philadelphia

    I was driving home on the morning of Sept. 12, 1987, in my first car, a 1966 Pontiac Catalina, after ending the previous night’s party on my host’s couch. The car had 421 cubic inches under the hood, an aquamarine Lucite steering wheel, and the profile of an Indian head in the dash that lit when the high beams were on. The radio, however, was AM only, so I kept a seriously giant boombox in the back seat. That grey morning, the box told me Peter Tosh had been shot to death in Jamaica the night before in a botched home-invasion robbery. At the time, I was mixing sound for a Philadelphia-area, white-boy ska-reggae band, and the news hit us hard. A year later, Tosh’s son, Andrew, taking up the mantle, brought some of the Wailers on tour. A very short-lived magazine assigned me to cover the son with his father’s band. (Carlton “Santa” Davis was drumming with a bullet still inside him somewhere, my memory says.) Here’s the boy Tosh, age 19 or 20, with, I think (pretty sure), Earl “Chinna” Smith outside the former Chestnut Cabaret, 38th and Chestnut Sts. (1988)

  • Bulletin board, Philadelphia

    (1990)

  • The neighbors’ daughter, West Philadelphia

    What do we think? Exploitative, like frames of the destitute? Should she not be seen nor remembered because she’s developmentally disabled, or should I have held back because she had no agency in the moment? She was the grown child of the family in the house next door. I don’t remember her name, and that’s too bad right now. She would sit there with her radio for hours upon end, rocking, literally and figuratively, in that chair. She screamed like a banshee, sometimes endlessly. (She could be heard through the wall.) But she loved my dogs and came to associate me with them. Here, she’s happy to see me. So, I took the shot. (1989 or 1990)

  • Saturday afternoon, West Philadelphia

    (2014)

  • Gabriele, Philadelphia

    (1984)

  • Shadows, West Chester, Pa.

    (2019)

  • Protest, Philadelphia

    (1991)

  • Skateboarders, Philadelphia

    (2004)

  • Engagement dinner, Philadelphia

    They came to the Philadelphia Cricket Club to celebrate the consolidation of their social class. (1984)