I’m always interested in people at work. I began to think a lot about fast food workers and wonder about their lives – and so I made some efforts to photograph them. They are mostly kids and put on big smiles when you face them with a camera. The Sonic Drive In I went to was a lot looser than the McDonalds I got access to, but they were both interesting places and I felt a lot of empathy for the workers in both.

I was pretty amazed at the food people were ordering at Sonic especially – lots of huge containers of surgery shakes drizzled with caramel, various sweet toppings, and finished with a cherry. The burger and fries seemed to be the healthy option for more responsible eaters.

I took some prints back to the Sonic to give to the people I had photographed. This girl, who had been expressionless and a little dour when I was shooting the others, had put on this beautiful smile when I photographed her. When I came inside to find her and show her the print I had brought her, she looked at me as if I were a child molester. This hurt my feelings, as I had gone to some trouble to make the prints and bring them, and all I really wanted was that same smile and a “thank you.” I thought a lot about what kind of life she’s had to make her react the way she did.

 

“We’renot bad people, we’re just strange people, you know what I mean?”

Quote from a tobacco farmer in far western Marshall County who let me photograph his Mexican workers. 

In Paducah I arrange to ride with the Police Department. I’m paired with Officer Kelly Drew but we had a fair amount of contact with the other officers on that shift as well. Kelly amazed me with his background (broken home, alcoholic abusive father, but saved by his grandfather who guided him through his adolescence) and his approach to his work and people. This was shortly after Ferguson and several other police shootings, but I watched Kelly defuse and calm potentially violent situations. “I want you to just go inside and don’t come out until tomorrow morning” he said to one very loud and drunken man at the Motel 6 who seemed to be doing everything he possibly could to get himself arrested. Being with Kelly was re-affirming though he said he’d never want his son to become a police officer.

Later on during my second trip to Paducah, I get a call from Jody Cash who tells me, in his soft, almost feminine voice (during my shift with him a phone caller kept referring to him as “Ma’m”) that he’s a State Police Officer and is willing to let me do a “ride-along” with him. We set this up, and I meet him at 8 am that Friday at the State Police Post outside Mayfield.  During his shift he’s the only officer covering 3 counties – McCracken,  Ballard, and Carlisle. Jody has always had a religious calling and began preaching when he was 16. At some point though, he realized that being a preacher wasn’t the right path for him and he began a career in law enforcement. He sees his religious calling as being better fulfilled as a police officer – this might seem like a contradiction in terms but as I spent the day – an uneventful one – with him, I could see he meant it in the way he treated the people he encountered. He had an air of calm about him, smiled a lot, laughed a lot, showed intuitive people skills and was a good judge of character. It’s obvious he loves what he does and is comfortable with who he is. He told me most cops really don’t like having passengers, but he likes the company. At one point he asked me if I was cold, explaining the he wears a bullet proof vest at all times and it’s hot, so he cranks up the AC in his car. As one of his fellow officers said to him once “I’d rather sweat than bleed.” His car (a Dodge Charger) is really his office, with weapons, phone, computer, printer (traffic tickets on the spot), “desk” light, etc. He showed considerable skill at typing in license numbers while driving at high speed. He tells me in some detail about the one time he had to kill someone. Any time a state officer kills someone they are required to take at least 2 weeks off – Jody took 3. He recounts how another officer killed someone and could never returned to the force. He calls himself a “shit magnet” because he feels like when something happens, he’s always close by. He doesn’t pull people over for speeding unless the are going at least 10 mph over the limit on smaller roads, and 15 over on highways –- very generous I told him. He tells me how he questions people to see if they are lying.  He recounts the following exchange with a suspected drug dealer:  “Do you live here?” “No.” “Did you spend last night here?” “Yes.” “Was last night the only night you’ve spent here?” “Yes sir, last night was the only night I’ve ever spent here.” Then he bursts out laughing and says “if only you knew how long I’ve been watching you.” Jody is an amazing man, and like Kelly, belies the myth of corrupt and abusive cops.

I went fishing one night for Asian Carp with Ronnie Hopkins near Kentucky Lake Dam. When I called him to set things up and asked him how he was, he answered “not fit to kill” (meaning not worth the price of the bullet it would take to kill him as he later explained to me). He’s a gregarious and funny man, never with out a cigar in his mouth.  He smokes Backwoods cigars which are (according to their website) “a popular domestic machine-made cigar. Not commonly smoked by those who are seeking high-end premiums, the Backwoods are an infusion of natural and homogenized tobacco with additive flavoring that is aimed at smokers who are looking for more than just the taste of tobacco in their cigars.”  He calls them his “pollution filters” joking that they filter out all the air pollution before it can get to his lungs. Ronnie is tough and hard working, always busy. His resumé, if you can believe what he says, includes work on Hollywood movie sets rigging explosives, and a stint at Gilley’s bar in Texas as a “rodeo clown.” He’s been divorced 7 times and has numerous children both natural and adopted.  He sang me a song he wrote that begins:  “Livin’ on the river is a mighty good life, but it’s kind of hard to keep a  wife…” He’s been a fisherman all his life and tells me he was conceived in a fishing boat. His “office” is in a shed, and sports half a dozen or so deer heads hanging from unfinished particle board walls.  There’s a small refrigerator with a microwave balanced on top, boxes of fishing and hunting equipment, an old arm-chair, a small TV and various other forms of useful clutter. He fishes from a very beaten-up Jon boat, maybe 24 feet, pulled by an equally beaten up Ford box-truck with the box part removed so as to convert it to a very long flat bed. On the lake he fishes at night because daytime recreational boaters could get their boat motors tangled in the nets he uses.  If he fishes the Ohio River, he goes during daylight, as he does during the winter. What with all the loading of nets, gear, ice, and other stuff, we didn’t leave his office until after dark. His first mate as it were, is a 21 year old kid named “JD,” an unmarried father of 2, separated from the mother of his kids who got bored because he was working so much and met someone else on facebook. Like Ronnie, JD is a hard worker, with very good people skills, just out of rehab with at best a high school education.  He’d been fired from the fish processing plant recently but Ronnie told him not to worry about it and that he could just come work for him. We set our nets, a total of maybe 17, stringing 3 or 4 together at a time and floating them in an open box configuration. Then we motored back to shore and JD set out to gather drift wood and build a big fire while Ronnie set up a gas grill on the bow of the boat and cooked minute steaks he bought from the Dollar Store. These are served on cold hamburger buns. They taste quite good. They had brought a cot and a sleeping bag for me and I lay there for a long time looking at the stars and listening to the fire crackle and the sound of diesel engines roaring back and forth in the distance. It was cold, and I sleep fitfully but I’m happy to be there and can’t remember the last time I went to sleep looking at the stars. The alarm goes off at 2:30, we climb aboard and go out to collect our catch. All night long JD pulls the nets into the boat and Ronnie extracts the fish using a big hook, and then slides them into the big metal box at the stern of the boat. The fish are big (the ones we were catching averaged 15–20 lbs) strong and can be violent. Ronnie tells me he’d been hit by one that drove his dentures up into his gums and when it was all over he was bleeding out of his mouth, his nose and his ears. The night I was with them Ronnie took some hard blows to one of his feet and yelled in pain, but was soon back to work as if nothing had happened.  Periodically JD shovels chipped ice over the fish in the box.  The bottom of the boat was very soon covered with fish slime, blood and water. We didn’t finish until dawn.

Perhaps the best way to describe my thoughts about the “new” Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project is to tell a few stories from my journey so far that illustrate some of the things I’m interested in covering. I’ve spent 3 weeks on the road so far, 2 around Paducah in Western KY, and one in Perry County in the Appalachian Mountains. Hitting the road again after 40 years was daunting, but it soon felt absolutely right.  I texted Ted and Bill one night as I was photographing a bridge outside Paducah – site of one of my 1977 photographs – “this is what god put me on earth to do.” The photographs shown here are not necessarily images I consider exhibit pieces, just illustrations of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing…  and the subject matter noted here is but the beginning, a mere scratching of the surface, of our quest to tell as much of the story of this State in the early 21st Century as possible.