Scott Streble - Welcome Home
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Scott Streble, photographer
Scott Streble likes to be where the action is. As a yearbook photographer in high school, he relished the “front row seat” and the “backstage pass” his camera afforded him.
As a professional photographer in the Twin Cities, Scott’s access to the wide world continues to both expand and narrow. Like the Latin word “apertura,” from which the word aperture derives, Scott’s camera and resulting photographs are an opening through which to observe the fantastic, the earth shattering, and the mundane.
In his commercial career photographing the famous and the influential (Mick Jagger, Madeleine Albright), chronicling cultural events like Farm Fest and Minnesota’s myriad county fairs, and shooting ad campaigns for Doctor’s Without Borders and Hennepin Health, Scott’s recent focus shifted, involuntarily. In the spring of 2020, with society in the grip of the Covid-19, and as the murder of George Floyd shook the world, Scott stepped even closer to his subjects and photographed individuals and families at home, waiting out concurrent crises. Front Porch portraits: Staying Apart Together is the culmination of that work. Taken within a context of uncertainty, the six-feet-for-safety separation anxiety, and as the world held its collective breath, Scott’s portraits give a glimpse of a calmer, more cohesive and familiar home life; each picture reads, mercifully, like an exhalation.
Like everyone else, Scott’s professional life was turned upside down by the pandemic. As he writes in the book’s afterword, “At the beginning of the Covid pandemic,” he and his partner, Jessica Bessette, were sitting on their couch and Scott was “bemoaning my work slow-down.” Jessica encouraged Scott to photograph ordinary people as they coped, as they stayed home, as they gathered where they could – on their front porches – for fresh air, for respite, and for communion with others. “Jessica knew it would be a good fit for the type of work I do, as well as give me purpose. She loves me and understands me,” Scott says. “If I can take photos, that’s what I love to do. If I can help, that’s even better.”
Over the course of a few months, Scott took 600 portraits on front porches across Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding communities. Word spread via Nextdoor and Facebook that Scott was seeking volunteers who wanted to pose for a front porch portrait. The deal was he would come to them, there would be no contact because it would take place outdoors, and the cost to the subjects would be nothing. The promise of “free” assured that everyone who wanted to participate, could participate. “People wanted to be part of the larger project,” Scott observed. Maybe they wanted a diversion, a reason to step outside together after so much forced time indoors. Maybe they realized that while things were hard in the world, things were pretty good with the family. Maybe they had never had a family photo taken. Scott honored all possibilities, and everyone got an image to keep.
Scott also invited elected officials to stand for a portrait. He sent email invitations out, feeling it important to include them. “It gives them a voice and shows them as part of the communities they represent,” Scott says. If you don’t look at the names and titles in the captions below, or already know their faces, you don’t see them as different from anyone else in the parade of portraits. So, locally famous or not, families of all sizes and configurations stood together and smiled. “People were generally unguarded,” Scott noticed about the experience. “Whereas in a studio, people are primping, getting make up done. Here they walked out of their houses, they were more real.”
The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, and his wife, Sarah, descended the fire escape of their building to take their place in front of the camera. Dai Thao, St. Paul City Council Member, Ward 1, told Scott during the shoot that while he was missing his constituents and in-person community work during the pandemic, he relished being at home with his wife and 3 small children (Scott captured Thao’s family of 5 as Thao’s youngest daughter toddles forward in the frame, arms spread wide and ready to grab the camera to, what, eat it?). Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner, LaTrisha Vetaw, poses with her husband and dog in her Willard-Hay neighborhood, backdropped by a bright red door.
Dogs are a theme across the front porch portraits, and lots of families have 2 or more of them in the shots; some have cats; at least one hosts a small flock of chickens. “There is a study,” Scott muses, “that if you have a dog or a younger kid, you are more willing to have a picture taken.” These are people, Scott thinks, willing to show up and show the world: “This is how we really are.”
And how ARE we? In Scott’s compositions, we see closeness and human touch, elements sorely missing during the pandemic. We see comfort and casual-ness (some subjects are in slippers, many have bare feet). There are fine details that hint at a family’s life: a gathering of house plants carefully arranged; a child clutching a basketball; cute babies, in cute pajamas, in parents’ arms; children in tutus; a sole figure, or an assemblage of multiple generations; a guitar; a broad brimmed hat; one cigarette; a subject taking a photo of his photographer. The viewer has the sense that the subjects have just stopped whatever they were doing inside and have come out enthusiastically to answer the salutation: Hello! Anyone IN there?
Mostly, people are smiling. All of them seem glad to be outside, away from Zoom meetings, or on-line classes, or doom-scrolling. Children squirm or stick out their tongues or stand still like mom asked. And T-shirts! People wear these words: “Hate is too Great a Burden to Bear”; “Be a Kind Human”; “Represent”; “Black Women are Dope!”; “It’s a Good Day to Write”; “Support Local Music”; “Warrior”; “I Can’t Breathe”; “L’Etoile Du Nord”; “Love.”
The front porch, of course, is a character in each of these photos. The props include house numbers, handrails, colorful front doors, Welcome signs, peeling paint, and post boxes. The photographic compositions exist within this defined space. Why the front porch?” Scott asks, rhetorically. Despite the differences in neighborhood or wealth, “Everyone has that. [It is] a continuity between people.”
Everyone in Front Porch Portraits is housed (at least at the time of the session), a fact not lost on Scott who has taken thousands of photos of homeless individuals for other projects. Ideas of home and homelessness rise again and again as the Twin Cities grapple with disparities of wealth and health, and as we seek solutions for this era’s racial reckoning. Could this project, this compendium of photos, be a happier yin to the disquieting yang of the past 19 months? “I am trying to let my subjects be who they are,” Scott offers. “I’m grateful to have been invited in.”
Resources:
To learn more about Scott Streble’s photographs or to purchase Front Porch Portraits: Staying apart together (which is self-published): https://www.mnporchportraits.com/
Photo portrait of Scott Streble by Tracy Nordstrom; all others by Scott Streble, http://www.scottstreble.com/