Street Portraits

Feeling stale, I decided to do something that makes me uncomfortable - taking portraits of strangers. To put myself at ease, I started up a conversation with a potential subject. Responses ranged from “Definitely not” to  “Well, OK” to “Sure, why not?” It helped if a subject wanted to joke around. I handed each a card with my email address on it, so that they could contact me for a copy of the shot.

         

“Lady Smoking”: she couldn’t understand why I wanted to photograph her. When I convinced her how eye-catching and interesting she appeared, she gave me a “Well, OK.’

“Two Retired Men”: These guys were a lot of fun. They gave me a “Sure, why not?”

If the effects of refracted, or bent, light isn’t surrealism, I don’t know what is. Refraction happens when light passes through a transparent material such as glass, which slows down the speed of light transmission, bending it in the process. And the shadows cast by the refracted light I think are equally as beautiful.

The two photos here are my studies of shadow patterns cast by the sun through a couple of wine glasses. In the video clip, I filmed a glass egg in front of my clip of a train yard. The egg’s fraction flipped the train yard upside down.

I think that the things that you photograph are like dreams in that they reveal unfulfilled wishes. On this particular day, I’d been trapped by a cold and long stretches of bed rest. Needing an escape that was more interesting than sleep, I was drawn to this puddle, which seemed to offer a way out, a portal to a more interesting world, at the very least.

For me, the news of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency of the United States was so grim that I decided to protest on behalf of the Affordable Care Act, which seemed doomed to extinction. I joined demonstrations held by ACA Advocate in front of Courthouse in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Could I use art in the service of political advocacy?

Here’s my launch into street photography portraiture: Colleen Davis, volunteer roving photographer who demonstrates in various cities in Tennessee and in Washington, D.C., stands in front of the Courthouse.

In a hurry with a lot going on around us, I used my iPhone. The results were too dark to see her face clearly, so I opened the portrait in Photoshop where I used Adjustments to lighten and brighten, targeting her facial expression that I think shows determination along with a micro expression of anxiety.

My critique here is that the shot’s too much like others of its kind. I’m determined to make future portraits more original.

For inspiration this past winter, I wrote an illustrated book of tributes to 21 gifted people who made my life significantly more interesting than it would have been otherwise. For my Vector portrait of each, I used a photo source of my subject’s micro expression, a fleeting facial expression that revealed an emotion behind his or her drive.

The spaces where my subjects worked I think are particularly interesting because they show how someone excited about bringing ideas to life can design and create their “dream space” that gives you the freedom and the time: a room in your house, an office; computer; your car.

No matter how varied my subjects’ workspaces, all settings provided the opportunity to collaborate, long stretches of time necessary for concentration, and a cultural requirement to think of how much an invention or innovation would help others.

Some workspaces were built-in, established by corporate, military, academic entities that needed solutions to problems as soon as humanly possible. Company leaders assigned their scientists problems to solve, or the scientists on their own identified problems and brought their solutions into being.

AT&T’s Bell Labs gave us the replacement for the vacuum tube, the transistor, as well as the digital camera sensor; General Electric’s laboratory, the LED bulb; Texas Instruments’ lab, the microchip; RCA’s lab, the liquid crystal display; and Intel’s lab, the microprocessor.

The U.S. Military, a famously prolific source of invention, gave life to COBOL, the first computer program to write in English, and the Global Positioning Satellite navigation system.

Out of a university basement physics laboratory came the first electronic digital computer. At another university, two Ph.D. candidates produced a site where information is readily available by tapping a few strokes on a keyboard. At a third, a group of roommates in a university dorm, led by a young visionary, created a social media site that is now uniting all citizens of the world in friendship.

Individual inventors and innovators dedicated spaces in their homes as shops or as labs. An actress and self-taught engineer, who invented a jam proof guidance system for torpedoes, set aside a large room in her home. Macintosh Computer was born in a garage.

Working in and from their offices, other individual inventors and innovators set out to solve problems that nagged at them. Because of a media arts instructor’s concern about the hurry with which material had to be delivered in a typical classroom, we can now learn in depth any aspect of the field from her video tutorial online site. A businessman, dismayed by the number of customers who bought electronic devises they couldn’t learn to use, established a tutoring service through which you can hire an instructor to come to your home and make it possible for you and your device to work amicably together.

I’m hoping my subjects will inspire us all to more fully engage our imaginations to solve problems, starting with a space dedicated to our new focus. We can identify a nagging problem, list ways to solve it, choose the best among the proposed solutions, and then try each one. Who else among friends and associates would be interested? Invite them to join you. Brainstorm.

Persist. The man who created Blogger stuck with it even after his partner deserted. Alone, he posted bloggers’ entries until Google bought his company.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice: “If you just work on stuff that you like and are passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.”