TEDx Portland 2018.
"…so dance with your own inner paradox"
- Margot Datz
An encore is the surest sign of a great performance. Enjoy the Weather, Jacob Hinmon, and I reunited to tackle the billboards for TEDx Portland 2018. To be asked back in what would be my second ever billboard shoot was a thrill. 2018’s concept, Bridges, is a distillation of what we produced for 2017’s Spectrum theme.
Again human-centered, black and white, yet this time seeking a minimalist, uncomplicated feel. Jacob and I chose an Avedon-esque single diffuse key, pushed through an octoabox grid, the subjects emerge from an undefinable Platonic ether. Putting humanity front and centre; encouraging the viewer to seize the gaze of their fellow citizens; striking a visual callback to our ancestral past when the social bonds were all that kept our hunter-gatherer predecessors from primordial oblivion.
These ads are not something the viewer merely sees, but encounters.
They engage the hominid instinct, tossing in a dash of '70s Punk Rock essentialism, harkening back to the “inkies” of my youth. We invite the viewer into a world of contradiction, the core duality to life wherein our biological hardwiring clashes with our social and experiential software.
As social beings we are inherently in conflict, and Bridges highlights that internal contrast we all carry. I see a manifest commentary on the managed Hegelian dialectic that rules our era; "left vs. right," "Liberal vs. Conservative," “us vs. “them.”
Advertising can transcend the ideological and philosophical differences, speaking to the best in everyone. Bridges makes the case that none of us is entirely composed of any one identity, perspective, or worldview. The actions of these extraordinary people transcend the dialectics pushed by our media, our politicians, our industries and cliques; It's commercial art arguing against social determinism. For a Gen-Xer like me, It's a call back to an earlier time when the individual was paramount; when “I was okay, and you were okay,” when we engaged with individuals and ideas on the basis of their merit, when diversity included thought, and we held space for people to be complex, iconoclastic, and beautifully human.
Danielle Outlaw
Ask anyone who was living in Portland proper during the infamous winter of 2016-2017 what they remember and they will regale you with tales that share a common theme: venturing out into Snowpiercer landscapes for kale and six-packs, city blocks encased in unprecedented ice, abiding rotating blackouts wrapped in a pendleton and maybe even two dogs against the winter chill, simmering post-election unrest with few storefronts spared in spite of seemingly inevitable apocalyptic glaciation, most of us just trying to carry on against Murphy’s Law malaise.
The appointing of Danielle Outlaw to head-up the Portland Police Bureau felt in-keeping with those unprecedented times. The first American Black Woman offered the job in a city notorious for redlining and racial segregation, Outlaw seemed a response to rectify the chaos and uncertainty that marred the start of the year.
Our final session on a long first day of shooting, Outlaw arrived direct from police HQ, cutting a striking and bold figure even at 5’6” in her police uniform. She was more introverted than I expected, poised; carrying herself with a quiet dignity.
I had pre-lit and was standing by as our stylist quickly steamed Outlaw’s uniform. On her left arm, bare in the waning January twilight, I caught a glimpse of ink, “Though she be but little she is fierce,” Shakespeare: Helena’s immortal words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While most commented on the topical interpretations of this passage, feminine empowerment perhaps, I caught on to something else: here was a police removed from the stereotype of her profession. She embodied complexity and intellect; a guardian philosopher alighted perhaps too soon for the time and place in which she served.
Driving past her billboard, on NE Broadway a month later, I contemplated the juxtaposition of “Humanity,” and “authority.” What was it about a mere uniform, a synthetic skin that gave the citizen so much pause? There seemed something arcane and primal at work behind our perception of police officers; some wily progenitor commanding order from the heights while holding the conch shell aloft. In this case, I’m glad to caught a brief look at the human being first.
Albert Chi
Dr. Chi has a presence that fills a room with ease; He embodies the phrase “still waters run deep.” Like a coiled spring, bound up with potential he is a man who has done it all, leaving behind a commission as a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, for a career in medicine.
Of particular importance in his portrait for TEDx 2018 are his hands, front and centre as a part of his daily practice, but equally present as the man himself. Chi gained notoriety adding inventor to his list of distinguished titles,
Attaching a modular bionic arm to the left arm of Johnny Matheny, a cancer patient who had lost an arm to the frightening disease. Transhumanism manifested by bionic limbs and cybernetics once lived firmly in the realm of pulp cyberpunk. Evoking the man-machine duality through the placement of portrait and text we’ve managed to invite the viewer to see the man behind the label; the phrase itself “bionic man” recalls the Six Million Dollar Man that kick-started a thousand imaginations in the late 1970s, a return to the idealistic futurism of the 20th century, wrapped in a minimal, personal delivery.
Peter Cho
Each morning my dogs and I emerged from our flat in Kerns with a single intent: make the foundation of our day fresh morning air and plug into the rhythms of the neighbourhood. We set out due South, crossing NE Sandy at 24th where without fail, there was chef Peter Cho opening Han Oak, his Korean-American family restaurant. Though we never exchanged words–introversion being my resting state–I habitually returned his warm smile and wave with my own before continuing towards the sleepy quietude of Buckman.
Imagine my surprise when I was brought in to Enjoy the Weather to work (again as a photographic partner) on the Bridges campaign for TEDx 2018 and in walked Peter with his wife and new baby.
“It’s you with the dogs!" he laughed, emerging into the brightness of the room, one hand extended in friendship and as affable as ever.
Months later as the billboards went up, his being just a block away from Han Oak above the Goodwill on NE Sandy, he threw me a thumbs up of satisfaction. We had borrowed his essence and transmuted it into a suggestion to pause and take a moment to savour the spice of each and every moment and we had placed it where he could see it and the part of himself others enjoyed through his culinary delights.
In cities we tend to take the presence of others as given, rarely bothering to stop and engage. So many of us have skills, talents, and passions that most never take the opportunity to get to know. Advertising can remind us of our communal bonds, that we are all in this messy game called life together; striving to become, to make a dent in the universe; that people don’t have to be afraid of each other and that we enjoy more ties that bind than we do hard edges that keep us apart.
Colleen Yeager
I am not a political man; I think politics short-circuits our humanity, renders us into automatons of a dialectic in which only the puppetmasters win. I am an experiential person, hungry for experiences unlike my own; it’s how we connect to the universal truth of the human condition. I recall, hearing Colleen’s story for the first time during one of our early sessions. Modifying the key light, negotiating more of it into her deep set eyes, I realised she had a quiet eagerness about her, the kind that comes from a clarity hard won by a singular call to action. Personalising a subject that had garnered much misunderstanding and no small amount of controversy seemed her calling: the experience, nature, challenges and legitimacy of trans kids. Her daughter had come out as her son at the tender age of five.
In our attention economy, mediated by screens, entire lives reduced to crumbs of data, we often forget that the hot-button-issues of the day involve everyday people; mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters; we all are someone to someone. Everyday people are brimming with unrealised potential, often merely in need of a forging experience–an “ah-ha!” moment to set us on a course towards meaning, like slot-cars electrified.
In the creative industries, perhaps we are too often compelled by an obsession with re-invention, not in the sense that we are ever-seeking to build a better mousetrap (I leave that to tech,). In our line of work we tend to wring our hands over new ways of selling the same old mousetrap year-after-year; the mousetrap being not the product itself, rather the story we tell about the product and by extension about ourselves. We’ve become risk-averse, yes, but the problem is even deeper: We’ve become authenticity-averse. And we wonder why we now experience such divisive times.
Colleen’s billboard was placed haphazardly above a fabric store on NE Martin Luther King Blvd., a quagmire of a street through above Broadway along which traffic crawls longitudinally through Portland’s Eastside. I never knew how anyone was supposed to see the billboard, let alone stop and consider who the everywoman emerging from the platonic ether was. Then it dawned on me: Heroism is all around us, often in plain sight. It’s just that we don’t expect it of ourselves, so we overlook it in our peers.
The Gay Beards
There was a shift in the psychogeography of Portland from 2017 to 2018, the signs most apparent as the neighbourhood shifted around me. Again, walking my dogs, camera swinging at my side, I returned to the double billboard at the corner of NE Sandy Blvd. and NE. Davis St. Loosely replicating my shot from the previous year. Sawdust and nostalgia, were the great oaks and derelict funeral home that had borne witness to many 3:00 am partings; we once spilled out into the street from Sandy Hut and Club 21, in a haze of Heavy Metal delight, glistening in our black leather jackets, youthful sweat wicked away in the cool night air.
Having crash-landed in Portland in 2010, long enough to witness a veneer of prosperity coat the formerly grunge landscape, part of me felt unsettled.
Things seemed to accelerate with moneyed haste. Was I so anchored into the substrate of what had been that I couldn’t be swept along by the boomtown undertow? There was no urgency in these neo-brutalist filing cabinets de rigueur as the decade wound down.
Hate. Love. Apropos to our bipartite dance with prosperity; physics in lockstep with those inner emotional territories. In order to move forward, we must leave something behind. Brian and Jonathan, two best friends who comprise the dynamic duo known as The Gay Beards, leant their infectious energy to that instance of doubt, reminding me that in the face of the uncertain, with all the trappings of familiarity falling away, we can laugh.
