The eyes have it
She was right. It does look like a little old lady’s house.
Nostalgically, I anticipate the smell of oatmeal and raisins to waft over me as I step through the gray-green yard off Saint Rose Avenue.
Just past a hand-painted sign leaning on a picket fence and proclaiming “Free Photographs for Neighborhood Picture Project” stands an intimidating tangle so tall it gives me pause—a real burning bush moment right here in the Garden District.
It’s a patch of potted rosemary reaching for the sky.
“You should take some,” she says. “I’m growing way too much.”
Not long ago, Mercedes Jelinek’s sign read “Free Neighborhood Photo Booth,” but seeing that, people stopped by expecting her to be giving a booth away. And that’s not something she is prepared to do. She’s taken her Richard Avedon-inspired meet-and-greet project across the country—including to Brooklyn, where she now lives and works.
She ventures inside for her camera, and I sit down in the firing range. I perch on a wooden stool while a charcoal-shaded sheet waves lazily behind me whenever a car passes and kicks up enough dust to mimic the wind. Just in front of me and level with my eyes is the lens.
When you’re having your picture taken you have a lot of time to think. How much of a jerk will I look like in this photo? Why did I buy this shirt?
Snap. Nope. Snap. Oh, well.
She brushes back a brunette strand swinging across the lens and pauses. She starts asking questions about my family and my job. This job. The job of writing about photographs, these things we obsess over on vacations, the things we pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for, the things that stare back at us from the walls of our homes and the wallpaper of our mobile phones and computers, the things so many readers took the time to submit to us for this very issue of 225.
I first saw her work hanging at Garden District Coffee. You’ll find her photograph of an elderly house painter named Blue in this issue. “The connection needs to be there in the image, in the eyes,” she says. “You can’t find it in the artist’s statement.”
As my anxiety slowly fades, I think back to the first time I consciously tried to produce great images with a camera.
It was 2001, and I was studying abroad and living at University College London’s dorms in Camden Town, an eclectic neighborhood filled with immigrants, punks, poets and ne’er-do-wells—both Dylan Thomas and Amy Winehouse once lived there.
One Sunday afternoon, I wandered through an open-air market and came upon a Greek Cypriot with a long blade carving up an array of tropical produce. Like a quick draw, I reached for my borrowed 35mm camera. I wanted to capture this man I couldn’t know doing something I didn’t really understand in a place where I wouldn’t remain.
The photo hung in a student art show at the LSU Union, but the best picture all summer was the one I didn’t get. The one that was there right after I pressed the shutter, and he looked up to see me. He grinned like he’d been waiting his whole lifeto be photographed at work. I think he even winked.
It was then I realized that photography is not just about capturing, but connecting, too. It is evident in Jelinek’s work, and I hope that it is apparent in the photographs of 225.
Because most often, the best images are not the ones we take but the ones we make.
