RI

It’s summer and I’m trying to make a portrait of two little boys on the back steps of an apartment building in South Providence. Nothing is really working….

Tracey tells everyone she meets that she’s looking for work. At church, going back and forth on the bus that she takes on North Main Street, bowling with…

I first met Lee at a meditation group that gathers on the West Side on Saturday mornings. He lives in my neighborhood, off Hope Street, and he and…

Darnell’s mother thinks he looks high in this picture: glossy-eyed, thin, struggling with life. She says it shows the pain he was in when I met him. I…

I’m back in Olneyville, in August, and it’s hot. The never-ending road construction has made it hard to walk, and I trip and fall and cut up my knee….

The man is handsome, with wide-set dark eyes and a soft beard. The sun has just set, so the glow in the sky reflects off his skin, his…

I am walking up Broad Street and making deals with myself: I have to talk to everyone I see, ask anyone who strikes my interest if I can…

When Delmi’s husband moved out, she had to find a way to support herself. They had both come from El Salvador and married here, in Providence. Al principio…

Sometimes I see a perfect picture in front of me: the light, the color, the mood, the gesture. The person. In my mind is the criticism that we…

Rose is the wife of a teacher at my sons’ school, someone whose beauty I’d long admired, though I didn’t know her very well. When I wrote to…

I was in Olneyville Square, walking, when I heard something clanging behind me, metal against metal. An elderly man in a brown cap was riding a bicycle. Under…

Rhonda says this portrait of her shows “mixed emotions”: “happy and kind of sad at the same time.” When I first met her, she was walking toward me…