“Hard to Sleep”

It’s been a bit of a grind this spring to get through the ski season’s magazine submission sorting process, but the upside is that it always seems to involve some sort of archive rummaging procrastination.  Sometimes you stumble upon hidden gems that you overlooked or just an old favorite you’ve simply forgotten.  As time passes, so do the images that one chooses to display and thus define their work.  We do this in attempts to create some sort of notion that we are this or that type of photographer,  to you or them.  It’s a necessary evil, but in the end it’s pretty much horse shit.  I’m a photographer.  I point my camera at things that catch my eye in hopes of creating some sort of wonder to share with you.  It’s really that simple.  Just because it’s not doing back flips or charging down a mountain doesn’t mean I can’t shoot it.

My roots in this process grow from the streets of Chicago where I spent the first 18 months of my rabid hobbyist days wandering from my loft in the West Loop.  I shot this candid image about a month after I got my 1st camera, early on a Sunday morning, 2 blocks from home at Union Station.  I’d lived in the neighborhood for about 7 1/2 years at that time so I was pretty familiar with most of the usual suspects that lived in the shadows of what was a rapidly gentrifying part of the city.   This is John. He goes about 6’8″ and over the years we’d built something of a rapport.  Living in the heart of a big city you tend to get jaded to panhandlers pretty quickly, but he was one of the few people I’d “lend” a few $ to as he never asked for it and more often than not had a great big smile on his face whenever I’d greet him.  I shot him several times but never again candid.  Of the tens of thousands of images I’ve shot since, none even come close to moving me the way this image does.

Categorization be damned.  I’m a photographer.