~ ~ ~ Photo of the Year: 2009
I've taken a lot of portraits of people on the street- people I've never met before, and sometimes never meet again. I like to think that you can learn a lot about a person when you ask to take their photograph- and it's not always their face that tells the best tale. For Richard, it was his hands that spoke to me. The first thing you ask yourself when you come across a pair of hands like these is, 'why?'.
I still remember the first time I met Richard- he was flat on his back on the sidewalk, his weathered body pressed up into a niche at the base of the Scientology Building on Hollywood and Ivar. I knelt down to take his portrait and shook his hand, telling him something like, "Hang in there,"
"God bless you," He'd replied. "God bless you, young man."
From then on, I'd see Richard somewhere along the Boulevard almost everyday. I'd spend time with him and he'd open up to me in a way that's often easier for strangers to do. At first, I couldn't understand half of what he was saying- his stories contradicted each other, or circled back on themselves. But, as time went by, I surmised that he'd enlisted in the Army as teenager in Kansas City, and when he came back from war, moved out West and got a gig working in a tire shop. The things he told me about his life, his family, his dreams- they were more motivating to me than any photograph I could ever take.
What bothers me about Richard, though, is how much he's like most Americans. Sure, he's homeless, but he does have an income- Social Security. Only, instead of putting that money to use getting a place to live, he blows it every month on jewelry, jackets, candy, musical instruments- whatever catches his eye. I didn't understand this thinking until I looked at the big picture- the way he's living is the same as the way the 'rest of us' live. Like him, we ignore the real source of our problems and merely pile luxury sport utility vehicles, gourmet lattes and satellite television on top of them- hoping we'd lose them in the clutter of instant-gratification.
We, and by that I mean middle-class Americans, may show some vague, surface acknowledgement of our predicament, but the truth is we're in denial. We're feeder fish, letting the rich get fat and the poor starve. "There are only four choices in this life," A wise friend once said to me, "you can work for a living, you can live off someone else, you can commit a crime, or you can die."
The point I took from this was that there's a commonality among those who live off others. Those who receive welfare and those who live off wealthy families often exhibit the same habits; drug abuse, depression, nihilism. Meanwhile, there's also a parity between the so-called schmucks who work for a living and the ones who commit theft- are they really all that different? Placed in the situation where it becomes impossible to survive, character and morals take a back seat to hunger.
He who becomes a slave to the American work ethic does so because he feels he has no choice, and he who steals is similarly motivated. So it is with Richard- he lives on the streets because he felt he had no choice. I like to think that somewhere along the line, we all feel this way. Maybe this makes us a little closer, and maybe -just maybe- this might makes us all realize we really aren't stuck, and we really can change for the better.
