Our People, Our Places: A San Diego Photo Story (excerpt)

Our People, Our Places

A San Diego Photo Story A collection of voiceofsandiego.org’s best photography

Sam Hodgson

Our People, Our Places

A San Diego Photo Story A collection of voiceofsandiego.org’s best photography

Photos by Sam Hodgson Edited by Andrew Donohue Book Design by Ashley Pingree Lewis

Copyright © 2011 voiceofsandiego.org

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For Neil Morgan, our inspiration.

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FOREWORD Poring over my pictures makes me understand how my shoes got in such bad shape. My Adidas have massive tears in both heels. My Converse are in better condition, but my pinky toe can stick out of the rip on the side. I credit the people and stories in this book – and the reporters who introduced me to them. They are the reasons I’ve climbed fences, lay face down in the dirt, sprinted through hallways and — as I worried about getting the best possible shot — picked at the torn soles of my shoes.

Every day, the voiceofsandiego.org newsroom buzzes with ideas about the region’s most important stories. We prioritize tales that would otherwise go untold. Stories have put me in the studios of prominent artists, in the faces of our elected leaders in times of triumph and of defeat, and in the home of a family awaiting deportation. They took me to the City Heights apartment of a young refugee from Burma who came to the United States with the dream that doctors could fix his deafness. And they put me on a sailboat with a blind man who wants to cross the Pacific Ocean. The people in these photos allowed me into their lives — for a few minutes or a few months at a time — and challenged me to share their experience through photographs.

This book represents just a sliver of the stories I’ve been lucky enough to learn about our neighbors, our leaders and our region.

With every frame I shoot, I learn more. I hope you learn from them too.

— Sam Hodgson

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OUR NEIGHBORS

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Mitsuhiro Iwamoto is blind and he loves to sail. He hopes one day to make it across the Pacific Ocean with just one other person on the vessel. Iwamoto feels his way around boats and has a strong sense of the gusts on the sail.

In the times in which his partner will sleep on the voyage, he’ll use advanced technologies to help him navigate.

Previous page: Hay Chay established a community farm in southeastern San Diego with about a dozen other Cambodian refugees in 1984. The group was evicted from the city-owned land where they toiled for almost three decades, although the city had no immediate need for the land.

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Bette Ferguson, 92, lived in all 50 U.S. states, was an extra in “The Wizard of Oz� and had five husbands. Her sharp memory is of interest to a University of California, San Diego brain researcher, to whom she plans to donate her brain when she dies.

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Clockwise from top left: 1. Harry Cooper Jr. is chairman of the city of San Diego’s Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention. 2. The San Diego Chicken. 3. John Haedrich, 81, has owned and operated Tip Top Meats in Carlsbad since 1979. 4. Ftimah Ilahi is an interior design student and works with furniture and antique dealers.

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Portia Kirk makes apparel for strippers. Above, she sells it at the Little Darlings strip club in Lemon Grove.

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Ken Childs raises buffalo and grows hops for brewing beer on his ranch in Ramona.

Opposite page: Eric March prepares to grow hops.

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Bill Lerach built a behemoth securities class-action law business taking on massive corporations like Enron and Halliburton before ending up behind bars after making secret payments to a client in an alleged kickback scheme. Now a free man, Lerach stays up on national happenings by reading six daily newspapers.

A man who goes simply by the name Aja heads down to the beach to use the public restrooms. He lives on the streets of Ocean Beach but considers himself a gypsy, not homeless. He was most recently in Seattle and says he came to San Diego for the weather.

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Businessman Bob Sinclair gives a tour of the Wonder Bread building in downtown San Diego, which is under consideration as a site for a new Chargers football stadium.

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Pastor Stanley Peterson leads the Guatay Christian Fellowship. He often deals with grieving community members. In his living room, Peterson describes being one of the first people by the side of a parishioner whose wife and son died in a car accident on Interstate 8.

Opposite page: A homeless man sleeps beneath a mural in Pacific Beach.

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Vietnam veteran Wesley Mock panhandles along the San Diego bay front on the eve of Veterans Day. Mock, who is confined to a wheelchair and says he is legally blind, spends his days asking passersby to “help out a disabled veteran.” He has a hospital band around his wrist from the night before. “I had three cracked ribs,” Mock says, “and I’ve got no idea how I got them.”

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Police arrest a homeless man on Island Avenue downtown after another resident of the area accused him of pulling a switchblade on her.

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On March 2, 2010, Josefina Perez’s partner was arrested at their Linda Vista home and deported to Mexico.

Her oldest son comforts Perez as she has her portrait taken inside the house. She and the couple’s three children face an uncertain future as they await orders from immigration officials.

For 23 years, Joey Riley has served as a caregiver to Michael Condon, 60, who is paralyzed below the shoulders. Riley is paid through a county-run program called InHome Supportive Services but is concerned about how budgets and new anti-fraud measures might affect the program.

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Denied health care coverage by the county of San Diego, Michele Quemuel lost sight in both her eyes. The diabetic believes she would still be able to see if the county would’ve provided her coverage. Courts later found the county’s income limits for residents like Quemuel were too restrictive.

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Students at Innovations Academy in Mission Valley take their recess on a small area of grass and dirt behind the office building that their school is housed in.

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Carlos Gonzalez tutors Chris Gallardo at Oak Park Elementary.

Mann Middle School teacher Ebonee Weathers works with eighth grader Brandon Sevilla on a writing project.

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Elias Garcia, 74, is an ex-bracero who worked on San Diego farms in the 1950s and ’60s.

Opposite page: Dung Vuong takes handfuls of incense out of the temple at the Chinese Friendship Association in City Heights. The incense is used as part of the Buddhist prayer ceremony.

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Norman Bryson is a professor of the history of art at University of California, San Diego.

Peter Zien is brewmaster of AleSmith Brewing Co.

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In front of the former location of the Latte Mi Corazon coffee shop, a French bulldog poked its head out through the curtains. The dog, Francesca, belongs to the store’s co-owner, Jerry Guzman-Vergara.

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