These photographs comprise a love song for north St. Louis. Over the last 20 years I have spent a lot of time in this part of the city, bicycling around, attending church meetings, working on projects, learning from elders. Like many, I have a deep affection for these places and an aching hope for a better future. The challenge in using photography to document such landscapes is to avoid overbearing narratives, either of ruin or redemption, because the story is never so cle

Starting this fall, I will be showcasing photographs that I have taken over the years to document Urban Cultural Landscapes. The first in this series is Coyoacán, a former colonia and now part of sprawling Mexico City. The word Coyoacán means "place of the coyotes."