Every day we're surrounded by people at work: men putting a new roof on
the house next door, people selling produce at the farmers' market--even just the crossing guard that gets your kids across Main Street safely. But how often do you stop and capture these bits of daily life
with your camera? In large part all of these people who keep the fabric
of our life together go unnoticed and undocumented. We tend to develop
a blind spot to everyday events, but the things people do for a living
are often quite interesting visually.
More importantly you never know just how valuable those images might become--particularly to the subjects themselves. Recently I had a big old maple tree taken down in my backyard and I got so fascinated watching them work I decided to document their amazing skills (and courage--the tree was nearly 90-feet tall). These guys swung around the tree tops with a four-foot chain saw like ballerinas on an aerial stage. I probably shot 100 or so images during the several hours that they worked.
Once the tree cutters had the tree down, I went inside, downloaded the images and printed a few of the guy that did most of the cutting. When I gave him the prints he was pretty shocked and I thought it was because I was able to hand him an 8 x 10-inch print in a matter of minutes. But the story was far more interesting: It turns out he'd never seen a photograph of himself at work and--even more incredibly--his mother back in Central America hadn't seen a photo of him in the 12 years he'd been living and working here. I was stunned. In all the time he was living here--and living here legally--he'd never had a photo taken of himself to send home.
Of course I gave him a set of prints to send to his mother and he was overwhelmed and very grateful. Here I was just trying to pass the time and put some more images into my library and those photos became a connection between a mother and son thousands of miles apart. Everyone has a story to tell, as a photographer it's your job to help them tell it visually.
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