#29 - Kelly Padgett - April 15, 2018 - Raleigh, North Carolina

I met Kelly Padgett for the first time the day I made these photos. Kelly contacted me after I put out a call for photo subjects for this project. We had chatted a few times on the phone several months prior to the photo date and we finally worked out a day to make his portraits many months after we initially made contact. 

I learned that Kelly grew up in North Carolina but spent a few years in Vietnam where he worked as a photographer, videographer, art director, and director of photography on a wide range of commercial projects. Give a look at his photo site here. While in Vietnam he fell in love with his partner Hỷ and they later became married. 

I had no planned idea where to photograph Kelly and I decided to "wing it" in a few locations that caught my eye on the way to meet him in downtown Raleigh. We set up the first location near the construction and revitalization of a $36.9 million effort to remake a 1-mile stretch of Capital Boulevard at the north end of downtown Raleigh.  Later, we drove over a few blocks to the Brutalist architecture of nearby concrete parking garage. 

I'm learning that it is a big challenge to distill the essence of a person into just ten frames.  It probably isn't impossible, perhaps extremely difficult, and I'm not sure what "distill the essence" even means at times.  Someone said; "Photos aren’t supposed to be the perfect depiction of anything. They exist for delight." They exist as a sort of record too, a bit of history,  capturing a slice of time. 

The nature of this project is showing everything from the shoot.  It either is ok, sucks or is good. That’s part of the challenge.  A lot of "professional" online photography is extremely curated and edited. I have always enjoyed seeing everything a photographer made on a shoot and perhaps getting a view of how the images were achieved.

What is to be learned from just making ten frames per person? More hopefully will be revealed as time goes on with the project.