Archive for: October 2008

When I first started thinking about moving to Minneapolis/Saint Paul, I imagined shooting a long term project that involved family life among the immigrant cultures in the area.  Finally, after close to six months, I am starting the project.  Back in June, on the 10th to be exact, I stopped to photograph a little grocery store, called Little Grocery, and went into talk to and photograph the owner.

Muhammed is from Djbouti, a small country in eastern Africa.  When I finally stopped back in, to deliver a couple of prints, his brother Shaehem was watching the store.  He says there are only about 100 people from his country here in the twin cities but that most of the African immigrant population here are from Ethiopia, Somalia, West Africa, and Ghana.  There are about 20,000 from Somalia.

Shaehem told me where to find a concentration of Somalians who would be willing to be tell me their stories and to be photographed.  Soon I will be trekking over to Minneapolis to start digging around and making contacts to start this project on immigrant families in the Twin Cities..  I will also start looking for publications and organizations who would be interested in publishing and subsidizing such a project.

I just re-watched Eddie and the Cruisers II, in which the main character says, “if we can’t be great, we should quit.”  Part of me agrees, and if I felt that I’d already exhausted all possibilities for and definitions of greatness, I would have to re-evaluate my endeavors, but I haven’t.  I have a couple of photos that I think might be great, at least in my eyes and as objectively as I can manage.

As I look at the images, I notice that the best are black and white.  I started shooting color about three years ago (more on that another time) trying to break free of my often compulsive traditionalism, and I’m still going to work with it and, of course shoot color for clients, but when I want to make “truthy” (to quote Steven Colbert) photos, I make them black and white. No matter what I think about marketability, I have to do what feels right, what will give my work the best chance to be great.

This one is certainly not one of the greats, but it kind of reminds of Tom Waitts.