Two pilots walked out of a downtown Memphis bar. It was a Tuesday night with nothing particularly eventful on hand. The only disruption to any other Tuesday night for the past several weeks was a noticeably early chill in the air.
The pilots walked, enjoying the chill and its sudden change of pace from the sweltering summer that—for now—appeared to be left behind. Under the neon glow and sodium-tinted lights of downtown Memphis, they searched for the perfect shot. Armed with a pair of cameras, one digital and one film, they scanned the blue and orange shadows cascading on the urban landscape from the lights above.
“Photography,” one said, “is all about lighting.”
The next evening, back at the same bar, Scott Davidson would explain this concept using an iPhone and a glass of water. “A lot of people ask how to take good pictures,” he said, twirling the half-filled glass around the table. “But it’s not that hard. You can take a picture of this glass right now and it will look like every other picture, but if you use the phone and light it, it’s so much more interesting.”
But back on Tuesday, Davidson and his compadre, fellow pilot and fellow explorer John Bell were keeping the secret to themselves.
A broken window, a locked gate, a sewer grate. The landscape was full of opportunity their creative eyes.
Over the past several years, Davidson and Bell had made a casual habit of these late night jaunts around the Bluff City. They’ve developed favorite haunts for their shots. In the same way that Monet studied and painted the effects of light on his pond, Davidson and Bell have studied the effects of light on the capital city of the Mid-South. And it was at one of their favorite haunts that the duo stumbled on this shot:
It is at once startling and humbling. It’s as real as it gets.
They had passed through the alley a hundred times. Photos of these old cobblestones bridging Riverside Drive and Front Street hang on Bell’s wall—but those photos are not like this.
“He was just sleeping there,” Bell said. “At first, we didn’t want to disturb him, but then I thought I should take a picture of this. He had a little bed made out of plywood, and he was laying next to an exhaust vent for heat. I thought, ‘that’s exactly what I would do.'”
The pair walked away without waking the Sleeping Man.
Bell posted the photo on his Facebook page the next day, and the reaction was mixed. It was a sobering reminder of homelessness and reality for a new urban middle class that has flocked to downtown Memphis in droves. All around the Sleeping Man stand proudly resurrected Cotton Row District lofts.
The lofts are a symbol of widely successful urban revitalization in the Bluff City. Across the city, warehouses and businesses from Memphis’s hey-day as the cotton capital, and later the hardwood capital of America have been transformed into hip, urban living spaces. Occupancy rates in most of downtown are at 90% or above.
The monthly rent in many of these places ranges from $800 to over $1,500 per month. People are now moving to downtown Memphis and away from the suburbs. The lofts have taken some 25 years to truly take off. By all accounts, they are a rousing success.
They all have heating and air conditioning.
But on a normal Tuesday night just steps from their windows, the Sleeping Man did not. You can rest assured that he is not alone.
Throughout the week, Davidson and Bell continued to explore places that Mid-Southerners walk past and drive by every day. What they found, right under the noses of what most of us would call normal life, was a very real world of homeless ‘houses’ and beds.
Nathan Jeffers knows about that world. Under the guise of a wide-brimmed straw hat and cheap, gold-framed sunglasses, Jeffers could pass for a Beale Street bluesman on any given night. But his ragged teeth reveal a harsher past—bluesmen make enough money for dental work.
As a vendor for the Rhodes College-supported newspaper, The Bridge, Jeffers spends his days selling the homeless-run publication to downtown residents and tourists. The proceeds go to support those in need of shelter. “Sometimes I can sell 100 of these in a day, then go back and get more,” Jeffers says. “It’s spiritual. It’s inspirational. It’s about real things going on in the real world, and people like that.”
Jeffers has a point: the real world. It’s the same point that Davidson and Bell stumbled into on a chilly September night.
Memphis has been the epicenter of the Mid-South for the past two centuries. From the Bluff City, Tennessee Delta towns like Brownsville and Jackson have imported and exported music, jobs and people. As Memphis goes, so ultimately goes the rest of the Mid-South. Haywood County Mayor Franklin Smith has often acknowledged a homeless problem in Brownsville. In Jackson, lofts not unlike those in downtown Memphis are starting to become popular.
So it seems that the Sleeping Man, then, should not only be a symbol to Memphians, but to everyone affected by homelessness in the Mid-South; because you never know when one of your favorite haunts is someone else’s home.
