Early in my career as a photographer and aspiring writer, I asked myself: Why am I drawn to throwbacks, to the salt of the earth, to the poor and downtrodden? Why do I enjoy the company of such people? Why, among my subjects, are there no bankers, no businessmen, no city dwellers, no suburbanites, and no one fashionable or affluent?
Instead I was drawn to quite the opposite: curiosities, anachronisms, misfits, innocents, and angels. They quickly became my family. They gave me something my blood relatives could not, something fresh and immediate, accepting and nonjudgmental. And they connected me in a way neither spiritual insights nor my own class and culture could.
