Street Portrait – Jim from Taos, NM

I’ve decided to devote the month of January to street portraits. By street portraits, I mean something specific. What I don’t mean is stalking somebody, or playing the flaneur, or taking somebody by surprise. Instead, I mean a photograph I’ve taken after I’ve spent time chatting with a person, maybe hearing something of their personal story and learning their name.

By that standard, this is probably the first street portrait I ever made. This is Jim and I met him when I was visiting Taos, NM. He was sitting in the shade to the south side of the town Plaza, watching as they set up for a festival. He was holding a point-and-shoot camera in his hand and told me he liked to take photos of things that looked interesting to him. I said I understood the impulse.

He said he’d served in Viet Nam, but was shot in the head as was obvious from looking at him. He said, too, that the local police were always giving him a hard time, but he wasn’t going to let that deter him. He’d keep moving around the square, watching what was going on, taking photos.

Part of my motivation for sharing street portraits is that, especially in the midst of a pandemic, there’s a tendency to withdraw from close interaction and to retreat into a self-imposed loneliness. I revisit these photos to remind myself—and hopefully others, too—of the closer connections we enjoyed in the past and will doubtless take up again in the near future.