By Stephen Wolgast
When a skilled portraitist coaxes emotions from the person in front of the camera, the image reveals something about the subject we wouldn’t otherwise know.
Yet as revealing as a good portrait may be, the subject’s feelings alone don’t make them journalistic. When does a portrait become photojournalism?
The answer may depend on the story the photographer tells, the one that surrounds the subject in the frame.
For a photojournalist, the job is also to convey the story happening outside the frame, reporting visually what the viewer cannot see. When that invisible part of the story is reflected in the subject’s eyes, face and body language, and when the portrait shows us something of the subject’s core, the portrait becomes journalism.
Working outside a studio, photojournalists take a step further. The setting becomes relevant, sometimes excruciatingly so, because the subject’s surroundings are filled with hints of the person’s situation and what the subject is reacting to as the shutter clicks.
That’s the intersection that Tamara Reynolds explores in “The Drake.” Named for a down-on-its-heels motel in Nashville, her book examines the lives of the people who stay at the motel and live among the stores, a cafe and a bar that help define the place.
Some are prostitutes, some are drug addicts, some are panhandlers, and all of them seem barely able to tread water no matter how hard they swim. They live their lives just a mile from downtown Nashville in a neighborhood that was ignored by developers. Failed by the safety net, they are forgotten, like the section of town where they spend their lives.
These are people with stories to tell, but Reynolds’ interest is more than simply a curious one. She is sympathetic to their circumstances and empathetic with what keeps them there, creating connections to her subjects.
Her interest in her subjects covered two areas, women and the people who live lives that make most of the rest of us uncomfortable, as Reynolds puts it. She wants to make sure we can’t ignore them.
That’s where her photography comes in. “I am compelled to make them known, to look at their bodies in space then find the moment where shape, texture, color and light convey the fullness of their humanity,” she writes in the book. Convincing strangers to let you convey their humanity takes some doing.
Reynolds describes how she would sit in the bar they frequent with her camera in plain view, meeting them in their own space, in their own time. “I kept coming back to the bar,” she writes. “The regulars were friendly.”
She never hid the reason she was there. “I always carried my camera. I wanted to be transparent about why I was there and who I was.” Her approach worked so well that some of her subjects would, after a time, just announce that they were ready to have her photograph them.
It’s then that Reynolds’ artistry comes through, in her portraits.
She talks with them and gets to know them. She doesn’t pose her subjects but lets them assume the posture they’re comfortable with, a pose that defines them. Some invite her into their rooms, and some choose the outdoors in front of a wall that Reynolds uses so it’s not distracting, like a seamless background. Favoring open shade, Reynolds waits for the moment to reveal itself.
When working on a portrait, Reynolds strives to find the moment when her subjects drop their facade, looking for the moment when her subject moves from a pose but hasn’t yet struck another. “Sometimes it happens right there, in the in-between. And I know it’s happening. Sometimes I shoot all these things on the other side of that thing in the middle.”
So she waits, and she talks, and she’s uneasy about her role. “It’s conflicted, because I’m manipulating and controlling the subject to get what I see, what I want, what is beautiful, to me. I want to expand who they are, to extend the story.”
By taking her time, the stories reveal themselves.
One story emanates from a brunette in her 20s, her hair past her shoulders, modishly dressed in a white sleeveless top and orange low-rise pants. She looks past the camera, squinting into the distance. Behind her is a cinder block wall and corrugated steel, all painted white, with barely a shadow cast in the open shade. She’s several months into her pregnancy, and on her full belly, she rests her hand, which holds a cigarette.
Sitting with her feet tucked under her on an upholstered chair in a corner, a barefoot woman in short-shorts looks directly into the camera with determination and confidence. She plays with her hair and clearly isn’t worried about what you think of her, of the tattoo on her calf and that she’s showing her leg to her hip. The soft light comes from a window just outside the frame — we can see the molding and its midcentury millwork next to her shoulder, grooves and angles contrasting her curls and curves, which are magnified in the soft shadow she casts on the gray wall.
Reynolds doesn’t use captions, and few of her subjects are identified, like the 20-ish woman crouched like a superhero as if poised to strike. But her gaze is distracted, unfocused. Her black boots, black hairband and choker, and aviator sunglasses clipped to a leather pouch at her hips appear to clad her with extra powers, but it’s unlikely she can escape from the world around the Drake Motel.
Most striking are the sleepers. Would you let a stranger with a camera in your room while you napped? Maybe they dozed off during a conversation. Either way, the bleach blonde in a pink tank top, under the covers with her arms akimbo, dozes, safe from the hassling and hassles of the street. Reynolds’ photo seems to create a safe space.
They aren’t all portraits. On a nearly deserted four-lane street, a woman whose hair is swept back from her forehead seems to dance as she embraces a man in shorts and sneakers, but there’s no joy on her face, and we can guess that the relationship is financial, not romantic.
Behind them sit semi-industrial buildings and a carpet shop, looking deserted in the sweet light that makes her skin glow. If they were in evening clothes, you might call their embrace romantic, but the asphalt and telephone poles give the scene a far more practical veneer.
In another scene, along a chain-link fence, you wonder what’s going on as a slim woman in jeans and white sneakers bends over a man sitting on a milk crate. Both of their faces are obscured — she’s turned away from us, her body blocking his head — and as we fill in the blanks, taking clues from the trash scattered among the concrete chunks, we have to wonder what we would do if we happened upon the scene. Turn away? Call the cops? Wait until the transaction ends, and ask if they need help?
Reynolds makes us wonder whether they failed, or if we failed them.
By the time she completed her book, developers had discovered the neighborhood around the Drake, and inevitable change came. The café is closed and for sale. A new police precinct was built, the better to protect the residents of the new condos going up where hopelessness used to be the only thing growing.
The old residents may be gone, but they haven’t gone far, just a couple of miles down the road. “Addiction doesn’t go away,” she writes. “It just moves.”
The Drake
By Tamara Reynolds
80 pp., $40
Dewi Lewis, 2022
Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.
