Chicken

by shoshin

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something. — JACKSON BROWN

img005Experiments with people using a toy camera

Approaching your subject
It is said that everyone you meet has a story to tell, and if this is true then everyone around is not only a source of inspiration, but a vault of information with a wealth of experience waiting to be opened, to be shared.

“How do you get across the river?” asked the driver, “use the bridge” came the reply.  It’s the same with people, you have to connect, you have to make a connection, you as the artist need to build that bridge. Don’t be a chicken, just go up and ask.

Handling rejection
I once heard a story about a guy who upon retiring, calculated that his meager military pension and social security would leave him barely enough to survive.

Searching through his family home, in a box of old papers, he found a recipe for a meal his grandmother used to make every year for the local church fair, and recalled how people would come from miles around just to eat from his Grandparents stall.

He had an idea. He developed his grandmothers ‘special’ recipe, and approached every restaurant in town, to ask them to use only this recipe and from everything they sold, he would take a small cut.

Now this was shortly after the war and money was tight for everyone, not only him, so you can imagine how popular this idea was going to be, not one restaurant owner in his town agreed.

Undeterred he continued, moving on to the next town, and the next, until he had visited every restaurant in the county, then every restaurant in the state.

“Come to the edge.’ ‘We can’t. We’re afraid.’ ‘Come to the edge.’ ‘We can’t. We will fall!’ ‘Come to the edge.’ And they came. And he pushed them. And they flew.”. #Apollonaire

image piped from ‘the internet’

There has to be a point to all this
There is. What I learned from asking people to be the subject when taking photographs is that some people say no. Not everyone, most people are willing, some are very eager, others will even make an excuse not to, some will even use their belief system to justify their flat ‘No’.

It’s all part of the process,  there’s a point where you you reach the edge of your experience and you feel uncertainty, fear, you manifest wobbly knees or develop a limp and it’s here where you can decide to continue or stop.

In 10 years Colonel Sanders had convinced and signed up more than 600 fried chicken franchises in the U.S. and Canada, and in 1964 sold his interest in the U.S. company for $2 million.

He was 65 years old when he began.

FOOTNOTES
Footnotes;
Suddenly, I realise the irony of using a picture of birds beginning to fly as a metaphor for overcoming fear alongside a story about a guy who made a living from the mass slaughter of birds in a story about not ‘chickening out’.

Thank you to (agreed by all five of us, based on a judgment of the  external appearence) the following types;

polyphasic sleeper, ginger dude having lunch, hipster, lady in sunshine, fit pretty girl, straaaange guy and the man with a tree who was sadly lost at the end of a roll.