Crack whores. Trannies. Construction workers. College kids. Local clothier Benny Krass. What these seemingly dissimilar subjects have as their common denominator is the happily jaundiced eye of Zoe Strauss to capture them. Like Nan Goldin without the fucking, Strauss is intent on capturing human moments without exploitation.

Or much expense to you, the buying/collecting public. All she asks is that you look and you buy. And you could, you know. Under the rubric of the Public Art Project, for whom she is the executive director (and sole officer), Strauss' boldly toned snaps of Camden's waterfronts and South Philly neighborhoods are gently priced at $5.

And for her bargain-basement brilliance and cost-efficient photographs—often viewable and buyable through her home-away-from-home gallery, the literally named Under I-95—Strauss has been rewarded with a really decent year.

A Pew Grant was followed by an ICA slide show of her finest work, followed by the very recent announcement that she'd won a slot in 2006's prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, which shows off contemporary national art at its most progressive.

To this, Strauss—a 35-year-old photographer, installation artist and sight-sensitive, prose-slinging blogger—confides something deeply soul stirring: "Holy fuck, right?"

From her house/studio at 13th and Dickinson streets, Strauss has spent five years working on a series of photographs of battered Philly and Camden neighborhoods and their inhabitants—drippy mascara'd transvestite prostitutes; hard-hatted dock workers; tit-popping, crack-smoking girls.

"My man, five years it is," she says, laughing about her first Under I-95 show at Front and Mifflin streets and the things that drove her to create public art. "I was compelled to this project then, and I am fueled by this focused compulsion now, but I didn't and don't know where it comes from."

The formal nature of the gallery world? The commerce of the art world? It's foreign to Strauss, a Mayfair native. All she knows of making photos available to audiences easily is that it is a requirement: "People—the public—deserve quality art. They need it."

Her photos and their captions (viewable at www.zoestrauss.com) tell stories of beaten-not-broken areas: the closed shipyards, the shuttered RCA building, the boarded Campbell Soup factories of Camden, the newly devastated areas of the Gulf Coast.

"Press close bare-bosomed night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars! Still, nodding night!" reads the text on her blogspot, quoting Walt Whitman. "The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down."

There's always an immediacy to her work, whether it's printed and shown one month after it's shot ("my usual," she says) or two years later. That electric currency comes from the beauty and struggle of everyday life. And then there are subcategories: the fluidity of gender, American identity, getting by, addiction, desire and desperation, love, failure and redemption. Then there are sub-sub-categories. "I'm kind of next-level crazy with the thought-outness of the whole project," she says. She returns to certain images, such as pay phones and mattresses—the mattresses being as close to Goldin's sex drive as Strauss gets. "The mattress photos are often keystones in the placement of the other photos because of the intimacy they represent," says Strauss. "The composition of my photos has strong elements of formalism. My portraits of people fit within some of the conventions of traditional portraiture."

Her work—her subjects, their public display under I-95—is certainly about breaking down all class structuralism and ideas of what constitutes "the museum."

"Even without taking into account the class aspects," she says, "I wanted a space in my neighborhood, South Philly, that was not a traditional "high art' zone." The sound of cars above is a perfect accompaniment, and hanging the photos on support columns allows for a crucial aspect of Strauss' work to come through: the idea that neighbors could happen upon it. "I love the accidental nature of my work," she says. Seeing a skeletal, grinning Benny Krass and a smirking Latino tranny while stumbling through Front and Mifflin streets can be a jolt. And the layout of the pillars allows viewers to enter and exit the installation anywhere and make their way through it in any direction they want. For five years, audiences have created their own viewing experiences.

Then came this summer, with the Pew and the ICA show, both in June. "And what the fuck was that, right?" Still, Strauss can't help but sputter and spin over the momentousness of the Whitney thing. Especially as she never courted the curators or sent photos. "I was just sitting on my couch working on slides when I get a call from Chrissie Iles, one of the curators from the Whitney Museum and one of the two Biennial curators. The call came out of the blue. I had no contact with the Whitney people before this. Chrissie just saw my stuff because she was one of the Pew jurors." Iles asked. Strauss said yes. "There may have been something else said," she jokes.

Did Strauss' work finally catch up to the standards of critical faculty? Or did the critical eye finally catch up with Strauss' aesthetic? She doesn't know. She's not particularly introspective about it all. "Not to denigrate my work—I'm not—but I don't know how I fit it in with other contemporary work that's marketable. And if I did know, I think I'd be too self-conscious anyway."