Kickstarter

I was inspired by a photograph of Alexey Titarenko’s from his series “City of Shadows” (Google search it right now because your mind will be blown). Alexey made these shadow photographs in an attempt to capture the overall depressing atmosphere of St. Petersburg Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I immediately related the somber nature of Russia to the nature of things here in Philadelphia. While Philadelphia isn’t experiencing the fall of a past regime, I wanted to capture the essence of Philadelphia in these photos like Alexey did with his project. My rationale for this is that we as a people are losing our human connections. Whenever we’re out walking among others in the streets, we’re all either looking down at the ground or at our cell phones. Nobody stops to look at each other. Everything is communicated via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s appalling. We’re in a city of over a million people and we can’t even look each other in the eye. Add into the mix a faltering economy and a city with soaring poverty and unemployment rates and you have a recipe for disaster.

So what I'm trying to do is make a photography book based off of all of this. I'm going to shoot strictly in black and white film and shoot at various times of the day and walk people through a day in the life of these Phantoms of Philadelphia. I'm going to get this book together by the end of April, so the money goes to covering the cost of film, film processing, and the printing/productions costs of the book. From the very second this thing goes through, I'm going to be working my behind off, and I could use any bit of help I can get. Thank you so much to everyone supporting me.