July 12: Ain't That Peculiar?
To plan our next three stops, we spend the morning
amid phone calls, reservations and routings. Then we
hit the Interstate for five grinding hours as we make
our way toward Peculiar...as if you didn't think we
were already there.
We arrive in Peculiar, Missouri, in the late
afternoon and scout our location for tomorrow's
shoot. A pocket compass helps us determine where the
sun will be when we want to shoot our school teacher
subject. She had told us that Peculiarites like to
talk about their unique three-legged water tower. We
figure that this is a good starting point for a
picture possibility, so it's off to the water tower.
It says "Peculiar" on it and that's good,
but someone has placed a small satellite dish on the
tower's railing and what we see is "Pec"
and "iar." Well, we think, the water
tower's pretty ugly anyway.
We find three good sites for a portrait, guess the
position of the morning sun and then decide to
scout the three roads leading into town. We're
looking for signs that say "Peculiar" in
case we need back-up shots.
A mile into the countryside we find no great signs
and decide to head back. As I make a U-turn I spot a
red plastic pinwheel planted in the grass at the side
of the road spinning in the setting sun. Between the
pinwheel and the pavement are four hearts fashioned
of thin red metal planted in the rough edge-grass. We
drive up very slowly and see that it's a shrine,
complete with a six-foot high hand-made sign that
displays photographs of four young women, three of
whom appear to be teen-aged sisters. The sign reads,
"Four lives lost because of a careless
driver."
There is a palpable sense of grief and despair
here. For three or four minutes, neither Matt nor I
move or speak. I stare at the shrine and try very
hard to imagine the loss felt by those who built it.
There is no way I can. I don't take a picture.
We tighten our seat belts and drive silently back
to Peculiar. Tomorrow we will be photographing a
young mom, maybe with her daughters. I think that the
shrine at the side of the road is going to influence
my pictures of people for some time.
July 13: When the Time is Right...
In 97-degree midday heat we make pictures of our
Peculiar schoolteacher and her daughter in front of
the Peculiar Elementary School, which comes complete
with a formal, carved wood lawn sign. Fearing that
the Normans aren't up to the heat, we use reflectors,
which are guaranteed squint machines.
Luckily, our understanding, cooperative model
grins so much that it doesn't look like she's
squinting. I like to work the heck out of a scene,
shooting as many as seven or eight rolls in 30
minutes, but this day is so unbelievably hot and
oppressive that all we can manage is 15 minutes
before it's off to a farm supply yard to get
Peculiar's claim to fame, the three-legged water
tower, as the background for some more shots of our
schoolteacher framed by some bright red fence-gate
pipes. We also get a portrait in the shade of mom and
her two daughters against the wall of the Peculiar
Farm Supply.
We make a quick trip to the Interstate for a shot
of her with the Interstate arrow sign proclaiming
"Peculiar" pointing right at her head.
With sweat dripping into our eyes, we take the
first suggestion of a break to say,
"Enough!" and stop. We get our releases
signed, say good-bye and leave Peculiar, heading to
Gas, Kansas, to photograph Bonnie, the owner of
Bonnie's Corner Cafe.
Bonnie's Corner Cafe in
Gas, Kansas. The shoot was scheduled
for the following morning, but the setting sunlight
was too good to miss.
©1997 Gary Gladstone
Bonnie's shoot is scheduled for tomorrow morning,
but we scout the cafe at 7:30 in the evening and
Bonnie shows up. If it's one thing I've learned in my
many years of shooting on corporate locations it's
that you shoot when there's sun and never wait
'til tomorrow, even if that's when the shoot is
scheduled. So I say, "Hey, Bonnie, mind if we
shoot a few tonight in the setting sun just to use
this nice light?"
We make an available light shot of Bonnie inside
the cafe, standing with her back to the window, which
shows reverse lettering; a small American flag sticks
out from behind a Coke cooler. The window light will
be helped out by the restaurant's fluorescents. (Hey,
a little natural green fill never hurt an editorial
picture. This is so non-corporate, it's fun!) We
rotate two tubes that are right over Bonnie's head so
they shut down and we're not throwing too much green
onto her. We do some work with the Normans for cross
lighting. They work for a short time indoors with
only one battery pooping out after 20 frames at half
power.
Then we rush Bonnie outside to show the front of
her Corner Cafe as the sun sinks into the trees
behind her head. Quick shooting, much bracketing.
Bonnie's husband arrives and begins shooting with an
Instamatic. Matt suggests that I put him in the
picture doing that. What a cool idea! We drag the
husband into the frame and ask him to point his
camera at her while we shoot the both of them. She's
looking at me, and he's standing between her and the
storefront shooting her. It's a slightly bizarro
touch.
We sit down after this quick shoot and order
dinner. The menu reminds me of the bill of fare in
the movie My Cousin Vinnie, where there were
three choices: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. Period.
Actually, this menu has just enough items to be
called a menu. It find an item called simply
"chicken breasts." I ask, "How do you
do these?" The waitress says, "Oh, we just
we pull them right out of the freezer and chuck them
on the grill."
I order the chopped steak, medium rare, to which
she says, "Oh, we can only give that to you
medium well or well." I opt for the chicken. It
turns out to be really good, but at dinner's end I'm
thinking that it might be time for me to rub up
against a bagel.
July 14: "If They Blink..."
At 7:00 a.m. we're back at Bonnie's Corner Cafe in
Gas to shoot Bonnie in morning light. She has about a
hundred little plastic American flags hanging from
three sides of her store's porch-like entrance. The
rising sun backlights the flags at the far end of the
porch. Bonnie is wearing a red T-shirt, and we start
to shoot on the porch with the big "Open"
neon sign in the window and a border of backlit flags
and the nose of a patron's serious Harley behind our
smiling subject. The reflector pumps a little extra
daylight under the porch eves.
While we're shooting I ask her if people make fun
of the name of her town. She replies, "Well,
when people ask us how to find the town, we tell them
to come on down the highway, and then we tell them
that if they blink, they're gonna pass Gas!" We
all laugh so hard that for several minutes no film is
shot.
After we enjoy a short stack of Bonnie's best
flapjacks, we hit the road for the long drive to
Rescue, Missouri, which turns out to be a town
totally without quaint, a featureless little stretch
of road between two other towns.
We discover a schoolteacher who is painting the
small rooms in the "new" school. She tells
us to visit Frank, her father-in-law, who lives down
the street. He's 80-ish, rugged looking, dressed in
overalls, his face weathered from working on the town
road crew. Today it's so hot that he's stayed off the
job. He thinks our project sounds "just
fine," and he agrees to pose for us tomorrow in
front of an old, abandoned one-room schoolhouse on a
nearby country road.
July 15: Rescue Me!
Earlier we had contacted the Carthage Press, the
region's local newspaper, to get some help finding a
Rescue resident to pose for us. The paper thought the
project interesting enough to ask if we'd mind if
they sent a reporter/photographer to cover what we
were doing. I'd tried to be shy about this, but ended
up agreeing in about four seconds. So at 7 a.m. the
reporter shows up at our motel and follows us as we
take off to photograph Frank.
I'm hoping I can stay focused, literally and
figuratively, while someone is shooting me shooting
Frank. I ask Matt to shoot the writer shooting me
shooting Frank just to make it as complete a circus
as possible.
Matt asks if we can stop and shoot the Rescue road
sign at the edge of town for his project of
documenting the town name signs. We stop and find the
sun on the wrong side of the sign, so I volunteer to
hold the reflector for him to throw some light onto
the sign so he can keep the sky dark. The
reporter/writer grabs her camera, thinking that we
are beginning our shoot, not just a quickie for Matt.
As I stand there with the reflector held high in the
air while Matt does the photographer dance to find a
good angle, I hear a click from behind me as the
reporter/photographer shoots me holding the reflector
for Matt. I smile sweetly at her and say, "If
you publish a picture of me holding a reflector for
my assistant, I'll have to have Matt killed!"
The night before we had asked Frank to please
bring a shovel or another road-crew working tool with
him to the shoot to use as a prop. I thought that
having him lean on a shovel would help him look and
feel relaxed. Now, as we make the turn-off to the
abandoned school, we're a few minutes late and
rushing. As luck will have it, we realize we've
fallen in behind a giant road grader that's lumbering
down the road at about four miles an hour. Damn, I
think, Frank will be wondering where we are and maybe
he'll decide not to wait and go off to work. We
finally reach a spot in the road where I can pass the
behemoth machine, and as I zoom by, dust flying, I
look over and see Frank high up in the cab of the
road grader—it's his shovel, the tool he
chose to bring to the shoot!
It turns out to be a decent prop but, wow, it's a
lot easier to reposition a hand shovel a few inches
than it is to move a diesel road grader around on a
narrow country road.
We do three variations with Frank and a safety
shot of the reporter/photographer and we're off on a
four-hour drive to Tightwad, Missouri, where we're
supposed to photograph the town's former mayor in his
volunteer fireman's coat and hat.
In Tightwad we scout before calling on our
subject. There's a barn-like fire station with the
small sign, "Tightwad Volunteer Fire
Department." But it has raised letters and the
sun is casting ugly shadows, making it hard to read.
We realize that the midday sun will make a
portrait here very difficult, but the sign and the
red building are too intriguing to pass up. We decide
to do the shoot with the former mayor/volunteer
fireman, but wait 'til 6:00 p.m. when the lower sun
will provide better light.
We meet Tom, our subject, and make arrangements to
come back in five hours to do the shoot. We ask him
to be sure to wear his fireman's turnout coat and
hat. It's over 95 degrees, but he agrees.
At 6:00 p.m. the light is at a good angle but the
sun is gone from the front of the building. Bummer.
We shoot anyway, talking ourselves into the idea that
this film can see into shadows better than other
film. Fingers are well crossed, and we do ten rolls
on Tom before it starts to look like he might die.
The town has a population of 50 people, but there
is a bank and that's where we're told to go to mail
our postcards. Seems that inside the front door of
the bank is a mailbox. Problem is, a month ago
someone robbed the bank and they no longer leave the
door open for mail drops. We have to use the drive-up
window to deposit our mail.
We leave town wondering what kind of loser would
choose to rob the Bank of Tightwad.
July 16: Sign's Language
After doing the research to figure out where the
rising sun will strike the front of the tiny post
office in Romance, Arkansas, we arrive to find that
for the first time on this trip we are absolutely
correct. The sun is casting a sideways glow on the
front of the building, and it looks like it's going
to last for another 15 or 20 minutes. We dash inside
and find Linda, the postmaster, sorting mail. There
are hurried introductions, during which I grind my
teeth because I want to ask her to postpone the mail
sorting because we have great light right now! I
wonder if she'll finish before our light dies.
Linda, the postmaster of
Romance, Arkansas, was happy to
cease sorting and take advantage of the afternoon
shooting light.
©1997 Gary Gladstone
Smiling on the outside, inside I'm screaming,
"If you don't stop chit- chatting with the
damned customers and finish that sorting I'll kill
you right here in your own post office!" I
repress the thought and politely explain that we're
loosing some really pretty light. I should have said
it sooner: Linda happily ceases her sorting and we go
shooting.
All goes well and three hours later we arrive in
soybean and cotton country. It's Twist, Arkansas, and
it's baking hot as we introduce ourselves to the
owner of the local farm and ask him to pose amidst
the rows of beans. He agrees and we do a few rolls
before the heat becomes debilitating. I ask him if
he'll come back at 7:30 next morning and he agrees.
We stagger into the motel near the
Arkansas-Tennessee border to cool off before dinner.
Later we drive into Memphis across a bridge that
spans the Mississippi. A giant, four-lane wide sign
hanging mid-span at the state line proclaims,
"Welcome to Tennessee, Home of VP Al Gore."
After dinner, we drive back and can't help but notice
that the back (now the front) of the sign says,
"Welcome to Arkansas, Home of President Bill
Clinton." Convenient, I think.
That night while I check and clean the equipment,
I realize that so far most of the shoot has taken
place within the view of my 20mm lens. A few
telephotos, but all in all this is a portrait series
made with a wide angle.
After years of shooting long lens details and
short telephoto portraits for annual reports,
it's both pleasurable and a little scary to be doing
all these portraits with a wide. It's a very
different, much less intimate way to portray people.
Quite editorial looking, I hope.
July 17: Easy on the Magenta
At 7:30 a.m. we're back in the bean fields. We
shoot a second portrait of our Twist agri-business
farmer, his face locked into a "What the heck am
I doing this for?" expression. Behind him
are fluted steel silos and farm buildings. Then we're
on our way to Defeated, Tennessee, some 350 miles
down the road. Along the way it occurs to me that
we're getting pretty good at this business of
dropping in out of nowhere, approaching country
stores, private homes and roadside farms and saying,
"Hi! We may look like Dick and Perry, but
we're really photographers from New York City, and
we'd like to ask you to pose for our book
project."
It works...and it gets easier each time we do it.
People smile the minute I describe what we're doing
and almost run to stand in front of the camera.
On the way to Defeated we can't resist stopping
when we see on the map a town called Only, which
turns out to be a falling down general store with the
former owner sitting inside in near darkness.
Chair-ridden because of weight and arthritis, she
oversees the only remaining enterprise in the
one-room building: the remnant of the post office
that was part of a general store that prospered until
Wal-Mart started selling goods cheaper than she could
buy them. The store's interior has the look of a
hospital room in which someone died. We photograph
her in her chair by the room's four 40-watt cool
white fluorescent bulbs using a 40 magenta filter.
Matt stands in front of the window to block what
little daylight seeps into the deadly scene to
prevent it from coloring her with too much magenta.
The picture looks sad, but that's what I intend
because that's the way the scene looked when I
entered the room. As I talk with this woman,
her charming, folksy humor comes through. I ask
her if she'll move her chair and her little dog out
onto the store's porch for a more cheerful, outdoor
picture. She's happy to do that and we take happier
photographs.
I don't know which of the photos will be the
strongest, but I do know that I'll choose the most
emotionally powerful one, no matter whether it's dark
and depressing or light and cheerful. This project is
not about making people lovely; it's about showing
what's there to be revealed. This woman was sitting
in a death chamber when we entered, so I feel
comfortable showing her that way if it is a better
picture.
We'd heard that a horse
breeder in Defeated, Tennessee,
had a full-size wooden horse for a mailbox. Not
quite.
©1997 Gary Gladstone
We move on to Defeated to take a photo of a mill
worker and part-time preacher who is also a horse
breeder. We've been told that he's built a full-sized
model of a wooden horse that he uses for a mailbox.
We spend much of the trip speculating about where the
postman puts the mail.
When we meet up with him he poses next to his
mailbox, which turns out to be a flat, painted board
fashioned to resemble a horse; the creature's head
opens to receive mail.
As the sun is dashing for the hilltops of central
Tennessee, we stop at a diner/country store in the
town of Difficult. Inside, an entire family serves
dinner to locals. We pay for our cokes and are about
to inquire about the town's name and ask them pose
for us when they ask if we're from New York.
Apparently they spotted the license plate on the
truck. I say yes and
the questions started flying. Turns out they once
lived way upstate, and even though true upstaters
(known to city types as apple knockers) would never
talk to Manhattanites, they treat us like
ex-neighbors.
We go outside and photograph the whole family, but
we feature dad and 11-year-old daughter up front.
He's got two tattoos and is wearing a bright orange
T-shirt, and she's in a brand new maroon cowboy hat
and smiles from behind her Daddy's considerable girth
as he's hugging her. The sun burns and crashes behind
the restaurant's roof.
Four towns and a 350-mile drive in one day. Are we
ever done!
Or so I think. On the way to our motel the sun is
resurrected in the rear view mirror and turns the
phone wires into ribbons of orange neon, dripping
from pole to pole. I stop, pay homage to Jay Maisel
and shoot with the 300mm.
Coming Next Week: Part III...
