RR Xing

Trains are always evocative, but they’re even more compelling when you’ve been listening to Isabel Wilkerson on the radio talking about her book The Warmth of Other Suns, all about the Great Migration. She spoke about how African Americans waiting on train platforms for their trip north would get scooped up in mass arrests, or were arrested right off the trains.

Just after hearing this, I pulled up to the railroad crossing on Hearst below 4th Street, just in time to watch a long, slow train passing. It was so long & so slow that I decided to jump out & ask the nearest of many day laborers to take my picture in front of the train. My photographer wore a peacock blue polo shirt with the collar turned up, & spoke very good English. He didn’t bat an eye, asked which button to push, & prompted me to “check it out” as he handed the camera back.

Juice Bar Collective

I was picking up olives at the Cheeseboard & looked for a photographer there, but found nobody suitable. Fortunately I was passing by another famous collective on my way back to the car & found, yep, another white woman sitting at a table outside, amiably unoccupied. At least she was older—I’d been noticing that the “younger” tag is getting quite large.

I wonder what’s up with picking younger people? Do I feel that they will somehow be more cooperative or respectful toward someone older who is asking a favor? Am I less likely to want to impose on older people, out of respect & deference? Do I identify with younger people more? Am I just part of the overall youth-obsessed culture in which older people are invisible? Am I more confident that younger people will know how to use my camera? What is it? I admit, this one has me stumped.

I’m amused by how much of my public alone time apparently revolves around food.

Ici, & some rules

I thought Ici would be a prime location for approaching patiently queued people, who would think it perfectly natural for one of the ice cream faithful to want a picture of herself at the shop. Much to my surprise there was no line outside, even though it was a gorgeous hot day. Probably because it was just before dinner time.

Peeking in the window, I spied my photographer sitting on the bench with no ice cream in his hands. Later I saw that he had been waiting for his friend who was getting ice cream.

Rose vanilla happens to be one of my favorite Ici flavors, so after getting my picture taken I went & stood indecisively in line for a moment, thinking about a scoop. Then, like everyone else who wasn’t there, I realized I’d be ruining my dinner.

I had sort of been hoping to have today’s picture show my surfer girl miniskirt, so that I would have proof & memory (two major functions of photography, right?) that the summer of 2010 was not totally unrelenting in its gray coldness. But my photographer was not interested in the skirt. Looking at this, it seems his compositional intent was to center my face smack in the middle of the picture.

Which brings me to the rules. An art project is really just a game I invent from scratch, & that includes making up all the rules to suit my purposes. I’ve been meaning to post them for a while. These are just to start with; I’m sure I will develop more. (I probably have more already & just can’t remember them all at once.) In no particular order:

1. No cropping or altering of the picture. What the photographer takes is what I post. I just do auto levels in Photoshop & that’s all. I post as many pictures as they shoot.

2. No directing the photographer unless they ask for it. Even if they ask for it, I try to give a minimum of guidance.

3. Maximum one photo shoot per day. There is no minimum. I do this when I feel like it.

4. I do photo shoots only when I am out in the world alone among strangers. If out with friends or in places where people know me, it doesn’t work. This is because the request has to seem as natural as possible. (In other words, if there are people around who know me, why would I ask a stranger to take the picture?)

5. Try not to ask shopkeepers, clerks, waiters, people who may feel obligated to be cooperative as part of their job. That doesn’t seem as interesting or completely fair either.

6. I’m not allowed to get neurotic or vain about what I wear or my appearance when leaving the house. This is not a fashion blog. The intent is to go about my normal business & be photographed as I am.

On BART again

After all the mulling in the last couple posts, I did fall into the overthinking pit when choosing today’s photographer. I cased out the men of color around me: two of them were completely wrapped up in conversation (not with each other, in case you were wondering) & the third was in a wheelchair. I wondered about the guy in the wheelchair. I couldn’t guess by looking whether his manual abilities included picture-taking; his hands were very small & soft-looking, & his wheelchair was the kind you steer with a little joystick-type toggle. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to take anybody’s picture for them when my hands were at their worst (I had heinous repetitive stress issues a few years ago). In the end I just decided to leave him alone.

Question: do able-bodied people ever ask obviously disabled people to take their pictures for them?

My photographer ended up being a cleancut white guy standing near me, who was completely unengaged in any kind of distracting activity, unlike the myriad readers, sleepers, & avid conversationalists sitting all around. He wore a casual jacket & backpack over his very pressed shirt & tie.

When I asked him to take the picture he almost seemed embarrassed; I couldn’t understand why until I saw that he had very shaky hands. He said something sort of apologetic about how it was hard to take the picture with shaking hands, or on a moving train, or maybe he implied both.

I said it was okay & he tried a second one. I was noticing what a nervous type he was, maybe really shy or something, & felt a little sorry for him. Talking to strangers, not for him, nope. Quite a contrast between his calm, self-possessed posture before I approached him, & the palpable nervousness that rose so quickly to the surface.

About the tags

I decided to tag each photo with rough demographics, based purely on my impression of my photographers’ race, gender & age. Age is a really hard one so I just have “younger” for anyone who seems younger than me & “older” for anyone who seems older than me. So far I have yet to ask anyone who feels like “my age” but whenever I do, that’s what I’ll put for them. Visual/social perception of race & gender are of course tricky things, & I’m sure I’ll guess wrong especially on race. But it’s already interesting to see that I am totally predictable: in my world it’s the white women who always get asked to do small favors like this. I haven’t really decided whether to try to buck that or not. I sort of think that if I just keep picking the “best” candidate every time, eventually the tag cloud will scream white female in giant letters.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I might not want to ask any more white women.

BART to San Francisco

This is probably the “worst” photo yet, technically speaking; my photographer was a little distracted & happened to take the picture just as the train jostled us all around a bend.

Which brings me to the choosing of the photographer: usually, I think, when scouting out a person to take a picture for us, we are looking for openness, friendliness, & a certain degree of idleness or leisure. We don’t bug the person who is obviously in a hurry or otherwise occupied.

In this case I let other factors influence me: I picked the person who was sitting where I thought the best angle would be for taking the picture. Somehow though, he was also the most approachable of the candidates. As it happens, in the picture you can actually see someone I considered asking, but didn’t—a guy who seemed a bit aloof, preoccupied more than actually occupied. I didn’t overthink all of this at the time, just looked around & took a psychic hit on the various people. Near the aloof guy was another guy who was scruffy, dirty, unkempt in a way that seemed to extend beyond the merely physical. Other candidates not chosen were a young woman studiously applying make-up, her mother(?) who looked even more aloof & closed than aloof guy, & a younger mom engrossed with her small daughter.

My photographer was a bespectacled college student with his math homework spread out on the seat next to him. He had just gotten on & I figured (wrongly, as it turns out) he was not deep into his work yet. When I said, “Excuse me,” he obviously thought I wanted him to clear the seat for me, then was subtly relieved to be asked to take a picture instead of surrendering his workspace. He was obliging enough, but as you can see from the photo his heart was not exactly in it. When he glanced at the result I could almost see him making the split-second decision that the shot was good enough to release him from this small obligation, & he would rather get back to his math than offer another shot.

Post office

Another surprised photographer. Obviously bewildered, she asked where I wanted to be & what I wanted in the picture. A head shot? I said it didn’t matter, I just wanted to be next to my PO box. She seemed to decide that she was too far back & took a few steps closer to shoot this.

Apparently, asking for a picture in the post office falls quite firmly in the category of Doing Strange Things in the Name of Art.

“Nice camera,” she noted as she handed it back to me.

“Thank you,” sez I.

Among the vinyl

I like to tag along when Donna gets her hair cut. I’ve always enjoyed watching haircuts—but hair washing, not so much. So I took a few minutes to skip up the block to Amoeba for the latest from Carolina Chocolate Drops.

With this photographer I noticed how she held the camera low in front of her. Is there any correlation between age & default height for holding cameras? I speculate that older folks, from years of holding film cameras up to their eyeballs, would probably hold a digital camera higher, out of habit. I think when shooting standing people, I hold the camera sort of about shoulder height, compared to this woman’s mid-lower chest height. She was probably in her early 30s.

Berkeley Bowl

Today’s photographer looked surprised; I guess in line at the Bowl is less scenic than the other places so far. But she gladly did it & then asked if I wanted one closer up. (I said no, but I’m wondering if I should zoom my wide-angle in first before I hand the camera to people.) Then I felt compelled to offer some kind of explanation, so I said that it was an art project documenting my life. Which it kind of is, even though I hadn’t been thinking of it quite that way.

I was doing a grocery run for my neighbor who is recovering from an operation, but of course picked up a few things for our household since I was there. That’s how the Berkeley Bowl works! When my Census meetings were at the Bowl our kitchen was very well stocked.

Enthusiasm at the farmers market

Wasn’t I just saying how people take more than one photo to make sure it’s right? Well, this woman really went to town & took four from all different angles. Entertaining to watch her moving around me, having fun with her little task.

The sun was in & out all afternoon; I forgot my sunglasses so went squinting around the market.

First of all...

Have you ever asked a stranger to take your picture for you, & they said no?

I thought not.

This is a form of generosity that is expected & practiced widely—remarkably so. Somehow we have all agreed on this: having a picture of yourself (or yourselves) is important enough that you can ask a stranger—just any passer-by—to take one, with the assumption that your request will be granted. We have agreed to try our best to take a good picture if someone asks us to do it. We ask questions about how to use your camera, what you want in the picture, & we will take more than one shot just to make sure it turns out well.

What is that about, anyway?

I have lots of reasons to do this project. I’ll be sprinkling them in as I go. For the impatient, clues in the sidebar under Why?

Diving into the deep end

I’m so camera shy & skittish about having my image on the interwebs, it just figures my first picture in this project would be not even fully clothed. Oh well. It’s true I do spend an awful lot of time in swimsuits.