Today I was talking to a friend about portrait photography that isn’t formal or staged. Not like wedding, engagement, or graduation photography, but something raw. Not just candid photos, but candid photos that capture a more liminal side of life that’s normally pushed to the edges. People who are on the margins of society and have lives that don’t follow the normal script of industrial or post-industrial mainstream society. Sometimes what comes to mind with this kind of photography is National Geographic magazines or art projects like “The Family of Man.” But it can really be done anywhere. People who live outside of conventional society are really everywhere, hiding in plain sight.
Talking about this specific kind of portrait photography that draws attention to the imperfections rather than smoothing over the edges of life reminded me of photos I took at Occupy Wall Street (some of them featured people who hopped freight trains to get there) and a set of photos I took of a “street poet” I met at Occupy Wall Street and photographed in Rochester NY’s abandoned subway tunnels in summer 2012.
These photos were shot with a Minolta camera from the 1950s and 35mm film from Kodak (someone has to support whatever is left of the economy in Rochester!). I believe I used a fairly high ISO in order to be able to photograph the tunnels and have the results turn out like this.
There’s no retouching in these photos at all. The way Germ looks is absolutely uncanny to me now. He was by no means a professional model or actor (although he did poetry readings in various locations around NYC). By 2012, he had been living on friends’ couches, in squatted buildings, punk houses, Occupy camps, and on the streets (literally, NYC sidewalks) for close to a decade. The best way to explain it to people who have never been exposed to Occupy camps or the hardcore punk scene is that it’s pre-modern. That life is close to the way people lived before the late 19th century and the introduction of electricity and plumbing. In some ways, it’s similar to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but in urban chaos instead of the jungle. One woman at Occupy DC joked that, “I used to wonder how I would look if I lived in the Medieval era, and now I know.” But somehow, Germ’s complexion looks flawless with no editing in these images. The combination of natural light with high contrast locations plus film photography worked amazingly well.
