When the Neighborhood’s Not Looking
William Cress

In writing the idea is to show, not tell. A photograph often does both. Yet the photographs in this book neither say nor show. They merely are.

The peripatetic peregrinations of an ordinary life, they function just like our own lives: they start, they stop, they snap, and they continue. They are the stillness in between moments, the points between A and B, those average places where people are born, buried, and born again, with miles of lives in between. The graveyard in this book is the graveyard where the photographer’s family is buried, where the photographer too will one day be buried. A conclusion already written. These images are how we get there.

This is the poetry of no-space, of no-where. And yet, as each image reveals, we are somewhere. To merely exist is to possess meaning.

Delaware County. Philadelphia County. Camden County. Cape May County. These are more than just maps, they are the truths we hold to be self-evident. Billy Cress was born in Springfield, Pennsylvania. He lives in the city of Philadelphia. He has been to New Jersey.

These photographs are the evidence.