Natalie Koffman

Where does home end and the street begin? What and who is community?
 

These questions were the starting point of Threshold. In 2008, after having lived on the same street for 14 years, I decided to step over the threshold of every house on the street I lived on.  I wanted to know who lived on my street and the act of stepping over the boundary and knocking on a door marked an act of stepping over the line of accepted privacy.
 

This series represents an invitation for each household to come to the boundary of their homes, to make visible the invisible and to reveal the community of people with whom I shared my daily comings and goings, often passing and not knowing who they were or where they lived.

The project culminated in an invitation to come together and become part of a portrait of the street.
 

In the middle of the portrait of the street is the mother of a family. At the time of the project she had lived on this street for over 40 years, the oldest and longest resident of the street. She bought up her family here and saw her children and her grandchildren grow up her who were frequent visitors to her house.
 

The street, the first houses of which were built in 1877 is named after the River Prah in Ghana. It has a history that connects to the building of the railway that passes through Finsbury Park and records show that the houses were originally a combination of single dwellings and lodging houses.
 

Each house holds myriads of stories and memories from the construction of the houses to all the stories of all the people who lived here.