Jared Leeds – Photography
It wasn’t until college when Jared started working for his college newspaper that he really got bitten by the bug. “I fell in love with photography and completely immersed myself in it. I was on the track to become a photojournalist and that is in fact what I did for a number a years. I thought I wanted to be Eugene Richards or Sebastão Salgado and tried my best to emulate them, but over the years I started developing my own voice and now my work looks and feels nothing like theirs.”
Boston has a checkered history when it comes to racial issues. For a while I had wanted to do a project that looked not only at racial division but also socio-economic status. I was curious as to how Boston and it’s surrounds dealt with these issues. Mass Ave. is a street that I, like many Bostonians, frequent all the time, but rarely all at once. It wasn’t until I decided one day to drive Mass Ave. from it’s beginning at Edward Everett Square in Dorchester to it’s finish in lush Lexington that I realized this was a perfect vehicle, no pun intended, to begin to explore these issues.