I’ve been wondering why I don’t update this blog more frequently.  And I realized it’s due to my boxing myself in to just basing the blog 100% on photos.  There must be a photo to explain (fill in the blank here).  Yes, there should be photos, I’m a photographer after all, and this is linked to my photography site.  But it doesn’t have to be about something that’s new and all the rage of my site.   And so, I bring you the retro series - looking back at the photos that birthed the photographer I have become. Sweet Auburn : Liberation Through A Life of Faith Series My senior year of high school I was asked to do a multimedia photography project for each of my eight humanities units.  For the first one, entitled and themed “Liberation” I did a photo essay on the Sweet Auburn district of Atlanta.  Where the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr was born, grew up, and preached.  I remember going down there to shoot and walking into the original Ebenezer (a newer installment called the Horizon Sanctuary was dedicated across the street in 1999) and hearing his sermons playing over the PA system in the old sanctuary.  It gave me goosebumps.  There’s something very intense about the power in his voice standing in the house of his God that he grew up in.  It was in that room that he sang in the choir, it was in that room where he became the man who led so many.   I photographed his gravesite, a beautiful marble tomb set in the middle of a fountain next to the church. Then I moved on to the neighborhood fire station.  And the shotgun houses, and then to the King Center.   Sweet Auburn is a neighborhood frozen in time.  There’s a two block strip that hasn’t changed much in the last 70 years.  It’s a marriage of old and new, the center, the new church, his body resting on a bed of water entombed with his brilliant wife Corretta Scott King, the faces of all walks of life.   These elements are new.  The church, the station, the houses, the hope, the despair, the beauty, and that wonderful Southern glow of Auburn Avenue remains the same.

I’ve been wondering why I don’t update this blog more frequently.  And I realized it’s due to my boxing myself in to just basing the blog 100% on photos.  There must be a photo to explain (fill in the blank here).  Yes, there should be photos, I’m a photographer after all, and this is linked to my photography site.  But it doesn’t have to be about something that’s new and all the rage of my site.  

And so, I bring you the retro series - looking back at the photos that birthed the photographer I have become.

Sweet Auburn : Liberation Through A Life of Faith Series

My senior year of high school I was asked to do a multimedia photography project for each of my eight humanities units.  For the first one, entitled and themed “Liberation” I did a photo essay on the Sweet Auburn district of Atlanta.  Where the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr was born, grew up, and preached.  I remember going down there to shoot and walking into the original Ebenezer (a newer installment called the Horizon Sanctuary was dedicated across the street in 1999) and hearing his sermons playing over the PA system in the old sanctuary.  It gave me goosebumps.  There’s something very intense about the power in his voice standing in the house of his God that he grew up in.  It was in that room that he sang in the choir, it was in that room where he became the man who led so many.   I photographed his gravesite, a beautiful marble tomb set in the middle of a fountain next to the church. Then I moved on to the neighborhood fire station.  And the shotgun houses, and then to the King Center.  

Sweet Auburn is a neighborhood frozen in time.  There’s a two block strip that hasn’t changed much in the last 70 years.  It’s a marriage of old and new, the center, the new church, his body resting on a bed of water entombed with his brilliant wife Corretta Scott King, the faces of all walks of life.   These elements are new.  The church, the station, the houses, the hope, the despair, the beauty, and that wonderful Southern glow of Auburn Avenue remains the same.

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