The bus stop on the corner of Superior Avenue and East 87th Street looks like any other bus stop in Cleveland, but as I walked past it with a group of St. Francis School students during a photowalk in St. Clair-Superior, one of them stopped.
It was Terence. He was snapping pictures himself, but when a scene caught his eye, he shifted from photographer to set director.
At the bus stop, he grabbed his friend Logan, set him up just right, then posed next to him on the bench. His voice was urgent when he called over another friend, Jerome, to take the photo.
Looking at Jerome’s photo, Terence said it looked straight out of the ‘90s — an album cover or music video.
St. Francis is right off Superior Avenue. It’s about a five-minute walk from the Cleveland Public Library’s Addison branch, so students hang out there nearly every day when they get out of school.
Their after-school routine became the premise for our photowalk. Molly Hanna, the principal at St. Francis, wrangled five of her students to participate in the project: Terence, Jerome, Logan, Kimmie and Nessa.
I brought along my colleague Franzi Wild, Signal Cleveland’s K-12 education reporter, to help lead the group. The Cleveland Print Room, a local arts and education nonprofit, was kind enough to lend us cameras once again.
We started our photowalk at the Cleveland Public Library’s Langston Hughes branch — where students from St. Francis’ sister school, St. Thomas Aquinas, hang out after school. From there, we made our way to Addison, about a mile down Superior.
The way the students talked about the library made it seem almost like another home for them. The librarians are always happy to see them, often ready with crafts, games and snacks. It’s also a place to make friends with kids from other schools, Nessa said.
The students are experts on the local delis and gas stations, too. They know which ones to go to for the best deals and which ones to avoid after encountering less-than-friendly clerks. Kimmie’s favorite spot is the E. 81st Deli (yes, the one that went TikTok viral a few years back).
The cameras slowed our group down — in a good way. Although we’d eventually get to the Addison branch, that destination felt less important than the scenes in front of us. Each time someone stopped to snap a picture, the rest of the group paused to look around for their own compositions.
I had to do very little coaxing. They encouraged each other to look closer, to see a familiar landscape with fresh eyes.
“I never really look at, like, how the neighborhood around here looks, but once I got the camera, looked more at the details, it actually looked kind of nice,” Kimmie said. “I thought it was just like, just any normal neighborhood with anything in there, but once I saw it from a different perspective, it looked better.”
The sun flickered out behind the horizon as we made it to the library, where the kids fanned out among their friends.
A few weeks later, Franzi and I stopped back at St. Francis to give the students their pictures. We spent some time reflecting together, placing one photo next to another and trying to figure out what threads connected them. Maybe it was the colors or the subject matter.
I’ve been sprinkling some of the pairings they came up with throughout this sequence of pictures.
Jerome, Nessa, Terence, Kimmie and Logan had all walked down Superior Avenue countless times on their way to the library or a favorite deli. But this was the first time they walked with cameras.
Franzi wanted to know if that changed the way they saw the neighborhood.
“Looking at it from outside of the camera perspective, to me, it was looking gloomy, and I didn’t really like how it looked at first,” Jerome said, reaching for a picture he took of a gas station. “When I saw, like, this picture, I don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t seem as gloomy as it did.”
More information about the pictures
Jerome, Nessa, Terence, Kimmie, Logan and I took all these pictures on Friday, Nov. 14, 2025.
You can see who took each picture, along with some more details about the places and people in them, down below.
Thanks to CatchLight and Report for America for supporting my work as Signal Cleveland’s visual journalist. A few years back, they partnered to create a program that places photojournalists in local newsrooms throughout the country. Signal Cleveland and I joined that program last year.
- Logan Horne (left) and Terence Foster (right) pose for a picture in a bus stop on Superior Avenue. Credit: Jerome Giles
- From left to right, Franzi Wild, Signal Cleveland’s K-12 Education Reporter, takes a look at pictures as she walks with Terence Foster and Logan Horne. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- Leaves on the sidewalk along Superior Avenue. Credit: Logan Horne
- Autumn leaves on trees along the Superior Avenue bridge over the Cultural Gardens. Credit: Logan Horne
- The view of the cultural gardens from Superior Avenue. Credit: Kimmie Foster
- Trees growing over a barbed wire fence. Credit: Kimmie Foster
- Sunlight beams through a tower in the Famicos Notre Dame apartment building. Credit: Nessa Foster
- East 81st Street Deli. Credit: Kimmie Foster
- From left to right, Jerome Giles, Logan Horne, Kimmie Foster and Ness Foster stop to take pictures. Credit: Michael Indriolo
- A residential street off Superior Avenue. Credit: Logan Horne
- A house on Superior Avenue. Credit: Nessa Foster
- Superior Car Wash. Credit: Nessa Foster
- A Dodge Charger parked along Superior Avenue. Credit: Nessa Foster
- A car pulling out of a shopping plaza off Superior Avenue. Credit: Nessa Foster
- A car driving past Divine Revelation Church on Superior Avenue. Credit: Terence Foster
- Apartment buildings along Superior Avenue. Credit: Terence Foster
- A selfie. Credit: Terence Foster
- The view of the cultural gardens from Superior Avenue. Credit: Jerome Giles
- An Audi and a Dodge Challenger passing by on Superior Avenue. Credit: Logan Horne
- A building across the street from the Cleveland Public Library’s Addison Branch. Credit: Jerome Giles
- Kiss Beauty Supply on Superior Avenue. Credit: Kimmie Foster
- A Sunoco on Superior Avenue. Credit: Jerome Giles
- Autumn leaves on trees along Superior Avenue. Credit: Jerome Giles