For these multilayered, life-sized photographic portraits I'asked strangers to pose for me and then blended the portraiture layer with several from the surrounding location. I don’t interview the subjects and I know no more about them than I leaned from our encounter when asking them to pose. People can lose their identity as strangers very quickly. So I take the pictures almost immediately, before familiarity changes the dynamic. 

This project grew out of a public art commission that would present the vitality if the Othello neighborhood in Seattle but  expanded beyond that community. Throughout its history Othello was a neighborhood of the excluded that was now trying to find a balance between gentrification and retention of its pre-existing, diverse population.