Recently, my dear friend Marcena Hopkins Peterson, who lives outside San Francisco, agreed to stay in my apartment and watch my dog while I was away. A bell rang: Marcena is a wonderful photographer, and perhaps she would be willing to do a photo essay for Tribeca Citizen…. She loved the idea.

What I find most appealing about the photographs—which I’m running in groups for technical reasons—is the way Marcena has discovered art everywhere in our neighborhood. Most of us are so busy getting from here to there that we don’t look at our surroundings the way a photographer would. “I’m drawn to the ‘pattern-making’ of everyday things, the idea of ‘found organization’ or ‘found still lives,'” she said when I asked how she selected what to shoot. “The New York Times did this beautiful article on Irving Penn. In it, the writer wrote that Penn’s still lives were as if things were fixed or had a permanent quality. That resonated for me.”

I’ll post more next week.