By trade, I am a cinematographer. I travel the world over making moving images. It’s a craft that requires intensive pre-planning, infrastructure, gear, and crews. It’s amazing, and I love it. But I’m also intrigued by the simplicity of telling stories while walking alone with a still camera - without a script, a lighting plan, actors, etc…  I treat both of these mediums as acts of storytelling but for me, “street photography” is the act of discovering stories as opposed to constructing them. And like my work with moving images, I think about still photographs not just as static images that stand alone, but as “clips of footage” that fit together in an edit. When placed side by side they create a greater narrative. 

In the case of this project, these images are a distilled from a larger body of work (a book) titled “Avenue of Roses”. They tell the story of a single street that thousands of people travel upon or pass by every day. I am drawn to places like this; that at first glance seem banal, overlooked, or by some definitions, ugly. Like I can sense hidden stories in these places; as if the “everydayness” of them is a costume hiding an alternate identity.

The Avenue of Roses is such a place. It’s less than a mile from my house with a name so much prettier than its reputation. It is the northern end of the Cascade Highway, and also carries the less poetic name of 82nd Ave. It used to be the rural outer edge of Portland, Oregon. However, consistent urban growth has tsunamied right up to and over it. It’s now a taught rope of pavement compressed on both sides by gentrification and increased housing prices. Modernization epitomizes this city, and yet, this avenue seems out of time – as if you time-travelled to the sleepier, sleezier, funkier Portland of yesteryear.

This project is a look at my city – into my “backyard”. A documentary of a city street against the backdrop of Portland’s rampant urban growth and how we, as denizens, have at times prospered, but also suffered from it. The images tell a complex narrative about the multi-layered relationship between humans and constructed environments, about landscapes and socioeconomic status, about isolation and disenfranchisement, about car culture, consumerism, and the growing gap between haves and have nots. I spent a year (January 2019 to January 2020) asking questions of this street, though in the end it has asked more of me. Mostly empty sidewalks, chain link fences, automobiles, glass, lights/color. It’s a scene from a movie you see everyday in every city across the country.

If you would like to learn more about this project check out the following:

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/kevin-fletcher-avenue-of-roses