Stories of the Street

Stories of the Street is a series of imaginative meditations—through prose poems, short-short essays, microfictions, and prose pieces without precise genre distinction—of what it means to encounter lost or discarded texts. Rather than simply deconstructing the lists, notes, receipts, or book pages he finds strewn in various cities, Lazar uses them as suggestive, capable of inspiring possible narratives that are at most latent in the text itself. The encounter, then, is an encounter with oneself and the mysteries of cities, where detritus frequently doubles as a sign saying, “Consider this.” Lazar’s narrative voice ranges in tone from the comically antic to the melancholy. By photographing what he describes as “messages that had escaped their bottles” on-location as found, Lazar has become a flaneur of paper debris, puzzling over the evidence of urban human life.