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Photos by Lisa Scheer, All Rights Reserved

Talking to Strangers

I am shooting more environmental portraits lately. One reason is that I'm trying to satisfy an assignment for a class I'm taking at the Center for Documentary Studies, at Duke University. Photographing complete strangers is both terrifying and fantastic; you have to get buy-in from the participants, condense a lot of visual information quickly, and pray for a good outcome.

Photos by Lisa Scheer, All Rights Reserved

From the "Waiting" Series

This is part of a longer-term project called "Waiting," a series of images that reveal something about the nature and identity of place. Most of the photographs were made in and around the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, the place where I live. Most of the images are of interiors of small, privately-owned businesses found in aging, commercial strip shopping centers: barbershops, ice cream parlors, laundromats. My hope is that, over time, this exploration will yield a kind of narrative, an edited vision about what remains of Greensboro's regional character. I plan to include environmental portraits as well. A more complete version of this series is available here.