John Hyduk for Esquire Magazine

Towards the end of March I received a call from a very supportive editor named Whitney Tressel at Esquire Magazine, asking if I was available for a portrait shoot in Cleveland. Although I'd never met her in person, we quickly connected on the same creative wavelength. We discussed the story and various ideas, and shortly after she forwarded me images that fit the mood we wanted to drive the images forward on, mostly pulling images out of my personal essays (The Kittie Luau , There is a Place.)

The story was about (and written by) a man named John Hyduk who lives alone in Fairview Park, Ohio, just west of Cleveland. I was very familiar with the area, as I once dated a girl who lived off the same road John does- funny coincidence. Anyways, John is in his late 50s and has been a writer and poet for most of his life, but he's never been above working whatever jobs he could find in order to support himself. He's currently a night shift dock worker at a bottling plant in the area.

I was fortunate enough to be able to bring my good friend James Roh along as an assistant. James, who just took a job at the Provo Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, only had two weeks before he moved across the country, and it was really awesome to be able to kick it with him for a full day (and he was a huge, huge help with the lights.)

We started out at John's home while it was still light out, and eventually made our way to a shipping yard in Brookpark, Ohio, right near the airport in Cleveland.







Thanks so much to Whitney, John, and James for helping bring this all together! I'm really glad at how it all turned out.