{"id":326,"date":"2019-04-29T15:32:14","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T20:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/?page_id=326"},"modified":"2021-11-29T13:38:29","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T19:38:29","slug":"my-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/?page_id=326","title":{"rendered":"My Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-style-circle-mask\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Lilly-on-the-lamb-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">My First Published Photograph<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>It began with a shout from a passing car.\u00a0 \u201cStop! Stop right there, I\u2019ll be right back! It\u2019s important!\u201d\u00a0 My friend, a tall, gaunt, bearded, fellow student at my university who had been walking along beside me gave me a look that said, \u201cWTF and should I pay any attention to that guy?\u201d My thought exactly.\u00a0 Without saying anything, we walked on.\u00a0 We had made it less than a block when an overweight, middle-aged man who would be a casting company\u2019s dream pick for a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman caught up with us, panting from the effort of chasing us down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cYou look just like Jesus!\u201d he gasped. &nbsp;The man grabbed my friend\u2019s arm and turned him\nfrom side to side, viewing his profile from different angles. \u201cI want to make\nposters of Jesus!&nbsp; I want to sell to the\nreligious market.\u201d&nbsp; Adding under his\nbreath, \u201cThat\u2019s where the money is.\u201d&nbsp; He\nwould pay my friend a percentage of every poster sale, he said, and he would\nsee his face everywhere.&nbsp; He would find a\nphotographer and they would start right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m a photographer!\u201d I interjected so he would see that not\nonly had he found Jesus, but a photographer as well.&nbsp; I had a camera \u2026 I did take photos \u2026 so maybe\njust one Pinocchio.&nbsp; He was impressed\nwith the serendipitous encounter.&nbsp; \u201cJust\ntake some test shots and get them to me,\u201d he panted as he hurried back to his\ncar. &nbsp;\u201cYou look just like Jesus, man!\u201d\nand he was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over the next few days we shot some clich\u00e9d photos: Jesus on\nthe water; Jesus on the mount; Jesus walking on the railroad tracks balancing\nwith outstretched arms; and delivered them by mail to the address on the man\u2019s\ncard, hopeful that we were headed toward financial solvency (the bar was low\nback then).&nbsp; But our dreams were crushed\nas the weeks went by with no reply by mail. &nbsp;No one answered the phone number on his card.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We moved on, thinking it was a fitting end for such a bizarre beginning. It wasn\u2019t really over, though, because after a month or two <strong><em>I<\/em><\/strong> found Jesus.\u00a0 I had traveled to another city and had made my way through most of the shops in the artsy district of town when I stepped into the poster shop.\u00a0 There was Jesus, walking on the rail with outstretched arms, right next to the poster of the two copulating hogs with the caption \u201cMaking Bacon.\u201d\u00a0 My photo on the wall of a poster store \u2014 I was a published photographer!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It took about three weeks to track down the vacuum cleaner salesman again.\u00a0 When confronted he blew it off as, \u201cjust testing the market\u201d before he contacted me to arrange for payment.\u00a0 But in the meantime he said he had something even better in mind for me.\u00a0 He needed a manager for his newly-acquired store, a two-story headshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To be continued . . .\u00a0 making films for Chile\u2019s Allende.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My First Published Photograph It began with a shout from a passing car.\u00a0 \u201cStop! Stop right there, I\u2019ll be right back! It\u2019s important!\u201d\u00a0 My friend, a tall, gaunt, bearded, fellow student at my university who had been walking along beside me gave me a look that said, \u201cWTF and should I pay any attention to&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":345,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-326","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1186,"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/326\/revisions\/1186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnshobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}