Butch - Portraits of Neighbors, Ledroit Park

Elm Street's caretaker, Butch. One day I'll need to ask him about his moniker.

Chuck Brown's Wake - Howard Theater, 29 May 2012

Is it correct to say that hundreds turned out - or was it possibly more like thousands - to pay their respects to Chuck Brown, Godfather of Go-Go music, at the Howard Theater earlier this week? For me the number was not clear. What was clear was the amount of love that the people of Washington DC shared for this man. To celebrate a person's life at the time of their death can sometimes sound like a cliche - On this day that is exactly what took place and in a way that would be hard to measure.

A few more from the set here

Darryl - Portraits of Ledroit Park Neighbors

Looking out the window last week, I saw my neighbor Darryl getting his hair cut on the sidewalk, so I grabbed my camera and ran outside with 4 shots left on an old roll of film. “If you're going to do that on the sidewalk I'm going to need a photo,” I remarked.

Darryl was born and raised in Ledroit Park, and he takes a lot of pride this fact, and he has a certain “old school” mentality that you really just need to respect. I’m sure the haircut is just another demonstration of this thinking. He loves the elders in the community and always has a story about growing up in the neighborhood. On that day he told me about his high school football team and the asphalt practice field they played on. “We were the toughest kids in the city, and no one wanted to play us,” he told me

On previous days Darryl pointed out some faded, barely legible text scrawled in spray paint on one of the houses on the block. Today you would probably not notice the words “Soul Brother” as you walked down the sidewalk, but Darryl remembered when houses were tagged during the MLK riots in the hopes that certain houses would be spared.