ROPE BURN

After spending a year and a half, searching through dusty and dented boxes brimming with tossed negative sleeves, retrieving images from days past, and then scanning the edits, I decided to pick up my beloved Contax camera and shoot again. Blame it on Spring, but it was time to get out there and do something again. Although it's not that I've not photographed at all, but that I've just shot very little, other than my family in Kentucky, whose likenesses I've frozen on film for more than two decades.

I went into Central Park on a rare sunny day and focused my lens on Justin, a newbie to New York from North Carolina. I had spied Justin at one of my event jobs that I do to survive in the City as a cater-waiter. It always fascinates me as to why a photographer or painter chooses to photograph or paint one subject over another. What makes someone interesting? And how do you carry that quality over into a print or on a canvas? Through cater-waitering in New York, I've met a lot of actor/model types who live for being the center of someone's attention, but what engaged me about Justin -- a part from his fiery hair -- was his subtle air of detachment and bemusement in the people and events going on around him. He didn't seem to be asking, if not demanding, attention.