This is John Crowley, he is the definition of community in Petaluma.

About 7 years ago, this Irishman decided he was tired of sitting alone in his Petaluma home, watching TV on Saturday nights… and he realized he was probably not the only one who felt that way, so he decided to make a change. He started with a simple pub-crawl with a theme: bring a book that changed your life and share it with people you meet. And as people started emerging from their homes and back into the community, the pub-crawls turned into conversation cafes, drum circles, open-mic nights, movie nights and more. Now Crowley has his own cafe where he can hold as many different kinds of community events as he wants and the people of Petaluma don’t have any excuses to sit at home alone anymore.

The reason I photographed John Crowley is for. Project HERE.

Project HERE is a cool community project started by Tyler Young. He is trying to pump up the community spirit in Petaluma by profiling inspiring people like John Crowley. The goal is to create a poster of each person with quotes about why it is so great to live HERE in Petaluma. And when we have enough posters at the end of the summer, we will have a show.

So, me, the photographer obsessed with the concept of community, I was psyched when Tyler called and asked me to help out. I am working on editing my interview with John Crowley now, but first I wanted to share my portrait of him.

I had a vision of John in the street with thousands of people behind him… but my vision came to me on Friday and the notice was posted on Saturday… so the fact that we got 30 people to come on a random Monday night, with only two days notice and without offering anything free… makes me pretty happy.

And in conclusion, I like my portrait of John Crowley and I am super grateful to the people who came out and I really hope it will work for the campaign.