To keep my sanity and regain my focus, every few days I’ll step away from the current wedding or portrait session I’m working on and fiddle around with one of my personal projects.  I am currently working on a Polaroid series of places around town – what happens is I’ll be driving from point A to point B and see something that catches my eye.  If I have the Polaroid camera with me (usually not) I’ll turn around and investigate further.  If I don’t have the camera with me (usually) I’ll make a mental note and purposefully go back at the about the same time of day at a later date.  Doing this project has made me realize how much I miss working with analog photography and the huge differences between analog and digital.  When I am working with an analog medium like Polaroid, I have to force myself to slow down, to look, to really see, to change vantage points, to look again, to think about what the image will look like before pressing the shutter.  By slowing down, the thought process changes and allows for a more critical analysis to take place sometimes forcing me to walk away and not take a photograph at all.  Here are a few recent images from my Polaroid Project including Ann’s Bakery, The Cain’s Ballroom, and a hole in the wall bar I may one day venture into on 3rd street called the Nite Spot.

Polaroid stopped making instant film a few years back, and as soon as I learned about this I bought what few remaining boxes of the 600 film I could find (at $10 a box) and stored them in the freezer.  Over the past few years I have been using the Polaroid film to photograph places around town that interested me .   My youngest son has watched me take film from the freezer and load it in my 600 camera.  One day I came home and found that he had decided he wanted to photograph things around the house that interested him, and he had taken the Polaroid 600 camera and loaded it with pack after pack of film, shooting door knobs, book shelves, ceiling fans, dog tails, toilet bowls, Hot Wheel cars, and a plethora of other interesting subjects.  (I promise I will share those at a later date.  Who knows?  They may be hanging in a museum someday.)  This film now fetches a hefty price of $35 or more for a pack of 10 photos.

As a result of my son’s art project, I was down to my last remaining pack of film (with an expiration date of 01/2007).  I had loaded this precious last pack of film in my 600 camera specifically to photograph the front porches of some houses on a section of Third Street near the TU campus sometime in the next few weeks.

Today I was going to clean the house, do some laundry, and pick up a few items from the grocery store but then Phil the Postman arrived with a package.  I didn’t think it would get here so fast, so I ripped up my list of planned chores and opened the box.  There they were; three packages of the brand new PX 600 Silver Shade Monochrome Instant Film for Polaroid 600 cameras.  You see, a group of Polaroid enthusiasts banded together with some investors and purchased the film factory that produced the Polaroid film and called it The Impossible Project.  They began to work on updating the film and manufacturing process, and finally the first new films were finally available and mine had just arrived.

I want to try out this new film so today I had to hurriedly photograph the home fronts along Third Street.  The images below are the homes along Third Street I took today and in the coming weeks I will share more Polaroid photographs from this ongoing project.

Jeremy Cowart, a Nashville-based photographer, developed a movement amongst photographers called Help-Portrait as means for photographers to give their time and talent back to the community to create a positive change in peoples lives. The idea was simple. Find people in need, take their portrait and deliver their photos.  I found a small group of local people, led by Whitney N. Ward, that had already begun the process of finding a location and setting a date and decided to join their efforts.  Whitney contacted the Tulsa Day Center for the Homeless and they generously allowed us to come to them last Thursday, the day they were serving their annual Christmas meal, and offer portraits to anyone that wanted to participate.

I have to admit that I was skeptical about this whole thing.  We weren’t offering food, shelter, counseling, training -so what would a homeless person come way with from a portrait session?   How could this help someone who carries everything they own with them every day?  What would we be giving them?  After my experience on Thursday, I’ll tell you.

Dignity.

As each person would walk in and take their place in front of the camera, you could see a physical change in the way the person looked, stood, sat, and responded to questions and direction when they stepped onto the seamless.  It’s as if, even for just a brief moment, they believed again that they were important.  Dignity.  That’s what what we were giving to these people.   The process of us coming to them, setting up, fussing over them, making a big deal about it, looking them in the eye, talking to them, gave them, I believe, a sense of worth, value, and dignity.  Our group took portraits of 131 people, and there were over 4000 photographers world wide that participated.

And even more important is that I came away with a deeper understanding of the plight of the people I photographed.

Look into the eyes of some of the people I photographed.  Every human being deserves to be treated with dignity.

I finally got around to taking a picture of my two monkeys for our Christmas card (you know, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes).  Wishing everyone the best of cheer this Holiday Season!