When I first went to Eastside, I was rediscovering
photography, which meant rediscovering
how to see photographically.
What fascinated me about drag racing is the people.
I could instantly see that there was a little kind of community
over there at the track, and these friendships
cross racial lines.
And the other thing that I noticed
is that women were racing against men,
and they were often winning.
I wanted to explore that community,
to understand that community, to say something about it
visually.
Within a year, I knew that I was going
to make this a long-term project,
and that I was going to build up an archive of photographs.
And I needed a name for it, right,
and came up with Democracy of Speed.
I made pictures seriously at Eastside
for about the next 10 years.
Eastside became a real community for me and remained so.
I learned the history of photography,
and I learned that I like writing about it just as
much as I do making the pictures themselves.
It led to a book project that I'm
working on now about an American photographer and filmmaker
called Gordon Parks.
And it led to the Holsinger Portrait Project, which
I'm co-directing, a way of using portraits
of turn of the 20th century African-Americans
in Charlottesville to explore the history of this region
and to explore it visually.
I would not be working on the things that
are absolutely central to my scholarship,
and I have to say to my citizenship,
if I hadn't gone to Eastside in 2002.