The Mattapan Series: The Blue Hill Artery was the final project I worked on during the 2014 fall semester for the advanced photojournalism class. As someone who has always been interested in street photography, the goal of the project was to document life on the streets of Blue Hill Avenue, a four-mile nerve that stretches through Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan.
Similar to many low-income, high risk communities, life exists on the streets, and Mattapan is no different. I specifically focused on the part of the street that runs through Mattapan, which is home to churches of many denominations, local businesses which consisted of visibly higher number of barber shops and hair and nail salons, family-owned restaurants and eateries of many ethnic origins, laundries and auto-shops along with vibrant-colored homes.
The area consists of many houses and businesses because of which the human traffic passing through Blue Hill Avenue remains constant; and having heard from many locals in the greater Boston area about the higher crime rate in and around Mattapan/Dorchester neighborhoods, I wanted to explore the everyday lives of the people who live or work or commute in that section of the city because I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what makes this place so unique and significantly different from the city of Boston even though these neighborhoods are merely five to seven miles outside of Boston.
Pankaj Khadka 