I have not often practiced approaching a stranger to take a photograph when I wanted to get close. Like for so many other people, I find it uncomfortable. Not because I am embarrassed, but rather because it feels so direct with no way for the either party to subtly recede from the confrontation. There is no way to escape a denial or probing questions as to why I want to take the photograph.
From a distance as I stood by on location for a scene from Tether, the short film we were shooting for the 50 Hour Slam, I saw this older man with lines in his face and grey hair. He was wearing a jean jacket and blue U.S. Navy sweatpants. My eye was immediately drawn to him, but I wasn’t sure why. I know the first reason I noticed him was that the sweatpants were the same ones I wore for physical training when I served in the navy. Somehow his overall appearance interested me, and after a little while as he was smoking a cigarette by a trailer, I approached him.
When I reached him, I smiled with my camera quite visible (he could easily see that I had been taking pictures on the set) and asked if I could take his picture. His immediate reaction was that I wouldn’t want to photograph him because he wasn’t interesting. But I said I thought he was, and he let me proceed. I took an initial photograph, and to my recollection, this is where he commented again that there were more interesting things or people to photograph. I responded to this by telling him that I didn’t see the world how others did, that I didn’t see only a narrow subset of people who fit predefined ideas of beauty as those who were worth photographing. From further talking it appeared that he respected the articulation of my point of view and accepted my interest in him as a subject.
As we continued to talk, he mentioned that he had acquired the building next to his business. It could be a good setting for a horror film, he told me. At first, he described how the building had been owned by a now deceased man who had been a hoarder and that the building was dark inside without any interior lighting and packed with stuff. However, nothing so far seemed particularly horrific about the description apart from significant darkness. But it is what he described next that was troubling. The prior owner wasn’t simply a typical hoarder: he hoarded indiscriminately. He hoarded trash. He hoarded food. He even hoarded his own feces and urine.
As the man continued to describe the scene, he told me that he and his friends had shoveled out seven trailer loads just from the first level of the building and there was more to dispose of before that floor could be cleared–and the place had three levels as I recall. He also told me accounts of a friend’s accidental encounter with human waste as well as having to be terribly careful in handling anything due to the presence of used medical needles in the trash.
Somewhere in discussing all of this, there was a minute when he leaned against the trailer looking off to the distance as he spoke, and he confessed that he had never seen anything like this before in his life. For a moment, he reached his hand to his mouth and touched his lips and said nothing. When he did, I took a shot. I knew intuitively this moment represented how this situation made him feel. And while I could tell it was a deeply troubling experience, I am thankful he permitted me to photograph him as he told me the story he chose to share with me.
Technical notes
These images were shot on Arista EDU Ultra 400 film with a Nikon F6 and a Nikon Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D lens. I set the camera to center-weighted metering and exposed by one stop over the meter recommendation in aperture priority exposure mode. I increased exposure because my concern was possible lack of detail in the shadows in this contrasty light. I developed this film in Kodak D-76, scanned it, and digitally edited the scans for mainly for dust removal, contrast, and detail. I did not use any lighting modification in theses images since I didn’t have any lighting equipment with me at the time.