Monday, my portrait show goes up at the Round House Cafe, which re-opens after a week of cleaning and restoration.  The portraits are hanging on the Round House walls, there will be a reception for the subjects and the public Sunday, September 18 (next Sunday) from 2 to 4 p.m.

I’m grateful to people like Treasure Wilkinson, a big-hearted animal lover and spiritualist (Dreamcatcher), for letting me take their photographs. Treasure could be a portrait show all of her own.

The idea of the portrait show is to celebrate community and to honor the people who stayed behind to live and follow their dreams in rural America, the place the politicians and economists left behind. These people stayed behind, they were not left and keep the idea of community alive.

Treasure is unique, she adores animals and helped to bring us the Gang of Four.  She claims to only smoke a few cigarettes a day, but I have not ever seen her without one. She wants us to take in a baby goat, but I don’t think so. She sleeps with one of hers.

These subjects work hard, have callings, not jobs, and are the faces you will never see on the evening news. But they are really in so many ways the heart of the country, of our community, of rural America. The portrait show is a privilege for me, and a major step forward in my photography.

I hope to work hard and learn more about portraiture, it is the art of capturing the soul.