Take a drive around the city. Expensive downtown high-rises lining one block contrast with poor and working class neighborhoods a few miles down the road. Sandwiched in between are the complex “emerging” neighborhoods whose ever-changing streets are constantly clogged with construction equipment. This is the urban landscape, and it’s what photographer Ken D. Ashton seeks out to document as its inhabitants constantly change and rebuild and, sometimes, neglect it. His new show at Flashpoint, De Aqui al Paraiso, is a collection of photographs from ten years of travel to these neighborhoods around the world.

Ashton isn’t quite after the urban ‘lifestyle,’ instead he captures the interaction that people — the tourists, the young city-goers, the fifth generation residents — have with their environment. This interaction, by its very nature in such a closely confined space, is a constantly grinding force that leaves its imprint on the sidewalks, the graffiti-stained walls, even the city skyline. Cologne (pole) focuses tightly on a street sign pole covered ten times over with stickers advertising local concerts and sports games. Occupying most of the print is the rest of the largely empty street, but that it’s completely out of focus emphasizes how the pole, even as such a tiny part of the environment, feels so much of the human hand everyday.