Bridging techniques rooted in photojournalism and traditional documentary photography, City of Champions is a photographic elegy to Meehan’s beloved hometown, and a meditation on a changing America. 

Meehan grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, amid relatives and friends of European descent — the children and grandchildren of immigrants who came to work in the city’s shoe factories, in the 19th and early-20th centuries. She left in the 1980s, during the city’s economic decline and transformation, and heard tell of the city’s changes through voices that were angry — at the city’s decay but also at the waves of newcomers, who were now people of color.

She returned with her camera in 2007, and spent the next three years exploring a place that was at once familiar and foreign to her. This series highlights the way racism and cultural dislocation can fracture a community, and interrogates the similarities — and differences — between Meehan’s Italian and Irish ancestors and today’s immigrants from Haiti, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau.