...this one picture...

I have gotten more questions and comments on this one picture of mine than any other I've taken in all my years owning and operating a camera. I take no credit for getting it. It was a cowardly shot. A bit of backstory, if you will.

Since childhood I have had a fascination with street and poverty-stricken people. I didn't feel pity or superiority - in the early years when my parents first split we grew up on the cusp of poverty ourselves. I still don't feel pity or superiority. Just fascination. I remember being about 10. We lived in an apartment in the Oliver area, and there was a homeless man who frequented our building's dumpster. I'd hang out my balcony or sit up in the tree and watch him. He would grab bottles to return to the depot, but that's not what was interesting - there were several folks who did that. He squished his bottles, which was different, too - most just tossed them in the carts. But what set this particular fellow apart was the white bottle he carried with him always. I think it was a brake fluid bottle, white, with a ringed neck. After collecting bottles, he would scurry across the alley to the parking lot behind the medical building there, and fill the bottle with pebbles, shake it a couple of times, dump some out, shake it again, frown, add some more pebbles, shake it, shake it once more to be sure, then close his eyes with a kind of completely content smile on his face, shaking it lovingly and rocking himself. And though he pretended not to see me, I know he knew I was there.

I've always wondered who he was, how he got to be there, what HIS backstory was. Did the white bottle remind him of a rattle he'd had as a child? Why did he always empty the pebbles out and refill them instead of leaving them once he got them right? Where did he live? Where did he go in wintertime? I regret not having been brave enough to ask him these questions. I wonder if I saw him again now if he'd remember me, peeking down at him from the tree, if I told him who I was.

I've gotten braver as I've gotten older, and have managed to talk to and photograph a few of them - prostitutes, beggars, limbless veterans... My husband is especially useful to this end, as he is attractive to homeless folks. They seek him out. And they share their stories. They all have a backstory, but you won't get that - you get stories of the glory days, or the latest crisis - flickering bits of their personal histories that string together in one big nonsensical tale.

When I'm not feeling brave, I can often be caught just staring intensely at the contents of shopping carts belonging to street people. Some folk have a hodgepodge of contents in carts like a home on wheels - bottles, a lamp, a picture, a blanket or pile of jackets - while others stick to just one thing. When I travel, I do the same, and street people are the same wherever you go, anonymous forgettable white noise in the landscape of wherever you happen to be. In Seattle, there were the window washers, and the rows upon rows of sleeping bags set out on the sidewalks just up from the Safeco Baseball field at dusk. In San Diego, there was the homeless man my Grandmother and I chased for 10 blocks to give $5 for a sandwich. In southern Texas near the New Mexico Border, there were the grubby little Hispanic children on the roadside playing with sticks and skinny dogs. In Victoria, B.C. there were the roadside ruckshacks set into the ditches along the highway, and the lazy kids with hundreds of dollars worth of piercing, tattoos, and hair dye sitting outside the Bay at Christmas time snarking at passersby for their lack of generosity.


In Paris, there were the gypsies, who worked in pairs, a woman and a child, always, holding out their cups with their chins pressed to thier chests, while the young gypsy boys would put on impromptu roller skating desmonstrations and quickly collect their cash before security could run them off.


There was also a cluster of filthy old men sitting in a urine-scented concrete tunnel kitty-corner from the Eiffel Tower, counting their coins together. In both the Pike Street district of Seattle and the Montmartre there were the penniless artists, peddling painting and sketches for cigarettes and pocket change. There was a beggar in Rome; earlier in the day he had been sitting on a street corner, like most, with a smalll saucer set out in front of a small grungy framed picture of the Virgin Mary, who had happened upon an electric lamp which he was gleefully wheeling down the road in a cart. I watched him struggle to get the cart down a long flight of stairs and take it into a long cardboard and tarpaulin house he'd built under the Ponte Sant Angelo. What did he think he was going to do with an electric lamp?

Which brings us to this picture, the one I get so many questions about, that was taken in Milan, Italy. He reminded me a lot of the fella who shook the pebbles in the brake fluid bottle. We'd were walking along the cobblestoned pathwaysfrom a schmancy coffee house, making our way over to the the Sfarnesco Castle. We had just come from meandering one of the rishest shopping districts in the world, and as we rounded hte last corner, here was this man with a shopping cart full of nothing but flattened shopping bags. The bags were labelled Escada, Prada, Gucci, Versace. He was picking butts. I pulled an Elliot Landy crotch shot with the Samsung point and shoot I'd gotten as a Christmas gift from my dear friend Scottie. Cowardly. I know. The irony of it strikes me still.

I have taken quite a few pictures of street people. I like to talk to them. They are far more interesting than the people who have nothing more to discuss than their mortgage and their new car. They tell you about their trials and triumphs, their hardships and happiness, their lost families, and their found families. They speak about the labour force from the viewpoint of the undereducated and underpriveleged. they speak of loast opportunities and estranged friends. These people, they keep me humble, and grateful for what I do have - a home, a job, a family. The have-nots, have a lot to share. If you're ever having a pity party for yourself, make a few egg salad sandwiches, grab a deck of smokes and a 6-pack, and head down to the 'wrong side of the tracks' with no desire to save the world and an openess and willingness to learn something from someone with nothing more to offer than fractured remnants of their personal histories.

This one picture, the one directly above, I love and hate more than any other I've taken. It's a shame I didn't speak better Italian - I bet this guy had a hell of a good story to share.

Comments

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Unless otherwise noted, writing and watermarked images on this blog are copyrighted to Hope Walls.