DC Alleys
by Daniel Weingrod
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
These images are part of an ongoing project examining the alleyways of the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington DC. Washington has always been faced with unique constraints of a designed capitol city, leading to a clash of planned versus unplanned spaces. The alleys are very much the heart of these unplanned spaces. Enabling access and pickup from the rear of residences, they are the liminal regions shielded from public view where garbage is deposited, projects are begun and left in partial completion and plantings proliferate in cracks and boundaries.
Within this project I have been working with diptychs as a method to better understand and clarify the content and character of the alleys and my relationship to them as a photographer. The alleys combine a unique tension of stasis and improvement, growing and crumbling, utility and useless. By defining space and subject across twin perspectives I hope to show the complexity and depth of these alley scenarios as well as defining my own physical presence as I move through them.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023