Vanessa, Philadelphia

Self-taught photographer Zoe Strauss began photographing Philadelphia’s marginal neighborhoods after she was given a camera for her 30th birthday. Since then she has excelled at unflinching, intimate, and poetic images of cities and the people who dwell in them—an attempt at creating, in Strauss’s words, “an epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” In a 10-year project beginning in 2001, she mounted one-day exhibitions each May—several of which featured this portrait—beneath an I-95 highway overpass in the neighborhood in South Philadelphia where she had grown up. She would attach her color photographs to the concrete columns supporting the expressway and make the prints available for the taking at the day’s end.