Waiting

The Shoeshine Man

Syria 2010:

Before the troubles a man could earn a bit of “tea money” by shining shoes. Here a grandfatherly man sits peacefully in the sun and waits for a customer. Indigo tribal tattoos cover his right hand, a sign that he is a Kurd.

There aren’t many shoeshine men in Syria or Turkey now. When I was in Turkey in the late 60’s, many young healthy men worked at shining shoes. It was the only work available to them. They all had beautiful brass shoe shine boxes. I’m sure those were quite expensive for them, but it was part of the mystique and many tourists wanted to have their shoes shined at one of those boxes. Now shops sell them as coffee tables, a memento of days gone by.

This photo had no mystery, no ambiguity or whatever the last word was that our teacher was always looking for. But I like it…I like the man. He looks like he is able to endure no matter what the circumstances.

I darkened parts of the photo where there were distracting elements. Here is an easy way to do that:

Add a layer and change the blending mode to Overlay.  Go to “edit”> Fill. When the dialogue box pops up, under contents use 50% gray and under blend mode use Overlay. In the toolbox choose the brush and set the foreground color to black. Then paint in the areas that you want to darken. Use 100% opacity. It will look too dark but you can change the opacity of your layer in the layer box to find the amount of dark that you are looking for.  This is an easy way to direct the viewer’s eye to what you want him to look at. It ‘focuses’ your viewer’s eye.

You might say that I should have darkened the right hand corner because it does compete with the man’s face for first place. For me those bundles tell about the man. He’s been shopping. I like that and I’m the boss of my photos just as you are the boss of yours. Don’t let the imagined viewer sit on your shoulder and tell you what to do. Well, try not to do that.

Once I had the photo ‘cleaned up’ I used Alien Skin’s Snap Art 3 to give it a painted look. I do like the way the brushstrokes highlighted his strong face.