Lawrence Standifer Stevens
It all started with a morning walk and a pretty picture. Lawrence Stevens started taking walks along Swiss Avenue last year to regain strength and build stamina after cancer surgery. “I’m rarely without my camera,” he says. So he started taking pictures of houses, people, dogs, trees, birds, yard sales, marathons and whatever else he saw along Swiss. “Here I am, 100,000 images later,” he says. The freelance web designer has found his passion on Swiss Avenue. He made new friends and renewed old acquaintances, and he discovered a whole new perspective on life. Stevens shoots everything from the Wilson Block, near Baylor hospital, with its dog park and Victorian homes-turned-offices, to the grand mansions of historic Swiss Avenue, and everything in between. He notices the difference in culture between the “big Swiss”, the historic district, and “lower Swiss”. “In the historic district, people let their guards down. They will stop and talk to you most of the time,” he says. “On the other side of Fitzhugh, where I live, talking to a stranger often gets you a nervous look. There’s a lot of distrust there.” The Dallas Theological Seminary is his current interest, and the school let him shoot from the top of its tower, which afforded a panoramic view of the area. Next, he wants to shoot home interiors, particularly “the Schole house”, a beautiful restored house on lower Swiss, which is one of the last remaining estate houses in Dallas. He was nervous about asking permission from the seminary, but to his surprise, they said “yes” without hesitation. And he walked the steps to the Schole house and rang the bell with much trepidation. But the owners invited him right in. Although he hasn’t convinced them to let him photograph the home yet, he’s still working on them. “I’ve really begun living by the principal that if you don’t ask, the answer is always ‘no’,” he says. “A lot of us miss opportunities in life because of that. I certainly have.” Not any more. Stevens’s next project is to make a book based on a year in the life of Swiss Avenue, “a contemporaneous history”, he calls it. It’s the kind of thing he wishes someone had made 100 years ago. And someday, it will be his gift to future residents of Swiss. “This is kind of my legacy,” he says. “It will live on long beyond me.”
