I was driving down a little street, a narrow offshoot of a well known Avenue on Skid Row. I can’t say more about the location although I wish I could. The name of the street is a classic one, and conveys so much of the tone and feeling of the place. I have learned that it’s not always possible to be transparent about location because on social media people will very deliberately seek out the people in my pictures if I include too much information. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, and sometimes it does.
The picture below is the reason I parked my car.
For whatever reason I found art here…like someone had made a painting or deliberate still life. There was a car parked nearby, a man’s legs hanging out of the backseat onto the street, and on the other side of the car sat a young woman, completely slumped over and unaware. Both had obviously just used something strong, and on the quiet block they seemed part of the core of the street, embedded deeply, a place in the neighborhood where they could be relatively safe and isolated while completely insensible. Little pockets of people will often be seen here, quietly going about the mechanics of getting high. I drive through often, and sometimes I will observe single women struggling through psychosis, alone, inhabiting a spot for a time (hours, days, a few minutes) before moving on. The woman in the image below stayed in this spot a few weeks before I stopped on this day, living on the mattress for a few days before moving into obscurity.
After photographing the little scene with the name “Desire” and the shoes, I saw Desire herself. I didn’t know that it was her name on the wall, or that she had written her name in red the day before. I saw a young woman in glowing taupe gold velvet bell bottoms standing a bit further down the street. I hoped that she’d walk into the photograph somehow…a wish I had at the time but understood it to be very unlikely. I have learned to recognize the difference between hopeful certainty (which is another way to describe photographic confidence), and restless futility, which happens too often and renders many prospective pictures failures, doomed to exist only in my mind.
As I stood on the curb, hopeful but resigned, a man walked over and literally commanded me to photograph him.
He wanted nine pictures. I did not want to give him one picture, certainly not nine. But I obliged, because I had the sense to understand that this was one of those times when I needed to stay flexible. I was not sure about the guy, and decided to shoot a few. As he readied himself, he reached into his glovebox and pulled from it a bottle of men’s cologne, which he liberally doused himself in. This gave the brief portrait session an olfactory signature that perfectly fit the images….I am sensitive to fragrance and I did not like being enveloped, but I do think it influenced my output. I wound up capturing his strangeness, inadvertently at first, just running on instinct, carefully sidestepping the strangeness and staying close to my car.
He spoke about running the world, and stepped in front of his beautiful new car. I was surprised by the car, as he was incoherent at times, literally talking in tongues. At one point he grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go….I pulled away, and walked back towards where the young woman I would soon learn was Desire stood in front of the wall, the person who had made a little art on this forgotten offshoot.
I said that I wanted to photograph the spot and she smiled, and said that it was her name, and that she had written it yesterday. I asked her if she wanted to be in the picture, and she did. Gracefully obliging a stranger with a camera, generously allowing me the privilege of photographing her. I was so happy to meet her, and her trust in the moments with the overbearing cologne worth the discomfort.
As we spoke, I learned that she spent a lot of time on the block. She had a warm presence and open, honest way of communicating about her life on the there. Our time was cut short when a woman walked over, warning Desire and me that the man who identified himself as Dr. PL—the man I had minutes before been overwhelmed into photographing—was a problem, a menacing figure that had taken to the block only recently. He had called the police on one occasion for no obvious reason—always a red flag on Skid Row—and had followed one of the women working the block, stalking her and causing great distress. It was beyond my tolerance, and time to go.
I will return, and hopefully Dr. PL will have either left voluntarily or been told to do so by someone on the block with the physical strength to convince him of the necessity. Most of those present were women, or smaller, more acquiescent men who were not looking for confrontation, something common on these streets. They were on this particular stretch to escape the stress of the main arteries, only to be confronted by a predator who recognized the relative isolation of the quiet space and understood the vulnerability of its inhabitants.
