One boy rolls up his trouser leg to show a scar. Which, he says, was created by a bullet piercing his calf. The other boy stares in horror at his friend's leg. He can not believe that happened to anyone, so close to his home.

Actually, the boys' lives are separated only by a street in Chicago. And yet both are at home in different worlds.

The boy with the gunshot wound is black, his shocked friend knows. Both go to different schools in Chicago, one on a public, the other on a private school. They also have no points of contact with each other except for Sedgwick Street, which separates its neighborhoods and their worlds of life. There, the photographer Martha Irvine has been looking for the AP news agency.

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Chicago: On Sedgwick Street

On the west side of the street are social buildings, mainly inhabited by African-American families. On the east side there are condos and luxury houses, where mostly white Americans live. Like Charlie Branda. That the two guys have talked at all, is their merit.

The 53-year-old mother and former bank clerk watched others cross the street when black families approached them. Or how people left the playground when African American kids wanted to romp there. "It should not be the way it is," Branda told herself, writes Irvine. Branda decided to connect both sides of Sedgwick Street - with art.

The idea came to her when a young girl supplemented the phrase "I would like to do that before I die: ......" with the word "art". After Branda had told her neighbor about the vision of opening her own art studio, there were supporters. And in October 2015, the Sedgwick Studio opened.

"You can not see this anywhere else today"

At the beginning the studio was hesitantly accepted. But with each art class came more and more interested parties. One of the participants was Cory Stutts, the director of the neighboring private school. Because she was ashamed to see so few other white families in the studio's courses, she took the sixth years of her school with her. And brought them together with the most African-American students of the public school.

First, Stutts thought, should the children ask themselves questions like "What are you dreaming about?", "Are you thinking about death?" and are you scared? to get to know.

"A group of white children play with a group of black people, you do not see that anywhere else today," said Eric Evans, one of the participating students. This has helped the Sedgwick Studio art project overcome the gap of Sedgwick Street.

When Branda crosses the street today, Irvine writes, she feels a deep love for this place on both sides. "They can not separate us anymore," she says.