Seeing Home

The New York Times’ Lens blog has a post up looking at the work of Los Angeles-based photographer Thomas Michael Alleman who has been wandering his home town’s streets with a plastic Holga camera for the last nine years.

There’s a visual style, a depth to the work, that I really enjoy. I’m not so sure I can go so far as to say he was “photographing grief” as he is seeing where he lives in a layered way.

He is asked when he will know the project if finished and I love the answer:

There is no actual need to shoot the picture anymore, but you still do it. You keep working on it because you are drawn to it.

That, right there, is the essence to a great piece of personal documentary work.