Divided #11 – Day 66

How hard is it to find a woman for a photo shoot in LA – much harder than you think! We have more portraits of men so far. So we wanted to do something about that in LA and shoot some portraits of women. And we worked hard on it for three days. But the skater girl flaked out on us, so did the Rock musician. The Beverly Hills socialite was out of town, in Capri actually, and the upcoming movie director who was happy to be part of this project was just about to board a plane to China for an opening of her movie. The waitress/actress wasn’t sure if she wanted to do it, and so we ended up with only one portrait of a woman in LA. But a very Southern Californian one! Roxy, the high priestess of a healing, positive energy meditation place in Venice.

Another challenge in LA was setting up our studio, since you need a permit for anything that looks remotely like professional photography or movie making. So we became experts in parking our Sprinter van in hidden spots, set up our studio quickly and shoot Guerilla style.

We enjoyed our days in LA, in spite of persistent June gloom (we had about 5 hours of blue sky in 4 days LA), but it was great leaving LA and starting the second half of our project, our trip back to New York. After driving up highway number 1 we arrived in San Francisco three days later – and to our big surprise this city so well known for its gloomy weather offered us perfect blue sky and sunshine. If there is a place with an incredible variety of people in one spot, it’s Mission Dolores Park, in San Francisco’s hipster district. We had set our aim to shoot a couple of portraits there. Little did we know that it is next to impossible to find a parking space in proximity of the Mission Beach as it’s called by the locals on a rare sunny Sunday. While Elias and Monika spent some time on the playground, Mathias circled through the neighborhood for one and a half hours (a new personal record) to finally find a parking spot. But it was worth the struggle. The parking was perfect, right next to the park, with a spectacular view of the skyline of San Francisco. And after we had convinced the park ranger who was inquiring about our big set up that we were just two harmless Swiss photographers we even managed to get two great portraits of local hipsters enjoying the park. After looking for such a long time for this parking spot we didn’t want to give it up so quickly and decided to spend the night in our van right there.

We left the Bay area happily driving up North. When we reached the majestic Redwood Forests of Northern California, we were in awe by the sheer beauty of these incredible trees. They are the oldest and largest living organisms on Earth, and some of them are several thousand years old. We were lucky enough to get one of the last campsites in a campground located in an old growth redwood forest. So we set up our tent next to these gigantic trees. We didn’t leave the forest the next day without Elias spending a lot of time climbing around on fallen giant redwood trees.

We didn’t want to leave California without shooting one last portrait. When we went to Walmart in Eureka, and saw Jamie, we knew we had found our last California portrait. At Walmart you can find a lot for interesting looking employees and we knew for a long time that we wanted to include one of them in the project. But we also had decided to bypass the PR department of Walmart. If corporate communication is involved in the US you know you won’t get anybody interesting – you certainly get no Jamie. She not only had a peculiar look and was very radiant, she also had an incredible story with being homeless for a long time, having lost most of her family and having left a serious drug addiction behind her. We knew that we could get a great portrait of her, but little did we know that she would give one of the best interviews. Her analysis of the US was more to the point and reflected than what we had heard from most people.

And then came Oregon. After spending 12 days in California it was great to finally arrive in a new state. But it wasn’t just another state. After just being 3 days in the state it has become our favorite one of the whole trip. Not only the nature is breathtaking with wild coastlines, endless forests and volcanos. The people here are as good.

Yesterday we were in Klamath Falls and we have never seen a small town where we have seen more interesting people. We could have shot so many portraits there… Finally we settled on Fearn Head, a Klamath tribe native American and Doug Sunday, a Vietnam veteran who tries to break the record in window cleaning. He has cleaned 899’910 windows in the last 10 years. We love Oregon!