i'm doing a little archive digging and found some photos from my first day at the Columbia Missourian while attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism. i decided to post these after reading Ms. Amanda Lucier's posting on how much she loves feature hunting and how different she shoots in the matter of just one hour looking for a feature. i ended up loving feature hunting. it's nerve-racking, exciting and scary all rolled up into one.
this seems like it was so long ago. it was my very first day at the Missourian (2007 i think) and I was the first photographer that walked through the photo department door on the first day after the holiday break. I was expecting to have at least a couple of assignments lined up but when I got in they told me they had none but just to go out and feature hunt and they may or may not need to use it. i was really, really nervous anyway. i spent the next 8 hours wandering around columbia, mo looking for anything.
i ended up visiting this woman's apartment in a local senior citizens complex. i can't remember her name off the top of my head (it's in a notebook in a box full of other notebooks in my closet at the moment). i met her earlier in the day and said she was always happy to have visitors. we chatted for a bit & she told me about her kids and mentioned that her husband that had passed away not to long ago. she seemed really lonely. i made this one while her attention was somewhere else.
i stopped into a laundromat for the bottom one. not thinking i'd find anything i started talking one of the workers and asked if i could follow him around for a bit while he did laundry people dropped for him. he ended up telling me he finds all kinds of things in pockets while doing other people's laundry like rocks of cocaine, marijuana, candy, pocket knives, photos.
none of the pictures ran the next day but they used the laundromat picture a week later or so in a new photo column they were trying to start.
i miss the hunt but i guess i still do it to some extent. now it's just on my time and my dime.
* I promised myself to make more of an effort to write with my posts. i think i had diarrhea of the fingers with this one.
2 comments:
Hey, Eduardo.
I remember the laundry picture. Good ol' times!
I remember that one too, but I'm actually sad they didn't go with the first. It trips me out sometimes thinking about how people's lives move on after we freeze a very small part of it. Hell, that could be the last picture she ever had taken.
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