A bearded silversmith shows his tools. A hooker reclines on a brothel bed. A cross-dresser leans on the bar where he sings. A lobsterman poses with his traps.
The American workers who stare from the glossy pages of Christine Hauber’s coffee-table book “Working in the USA” (Silver Spectrum, $48.95) look proud, optimistic, stoic, grimy or amused.
Most of the people captured on film were also surprised by the attention.
“They didn’t think that their jobs were significant enough for anyone to want to take their picture,” said Hauber, a 37-year-old Denver photographer.
For seven years she dreamed about telling their stories but was afraid to pack her camera and leave behind a successful portrait business.
Eventually her business reached a natural crossroads.
It was growing quickly enough that she should have expanded but, said Hauber, “I didn’t want the responsibility of a studio.”
Her father, Charles, an accountant with MDC Holdings, convinced her it was time to follow her dream.
“(He) sat me down and said, ‘When are you going to do that American project you are talking about? When will you ever have the money?”‘ Hauber said.
She took her savings, her credit cards and a $3,000 grant from her father’s boss, art patron Larry Mizel, and set out on a three-year odyssey.
Hauber wanted to photograph the American people as they are – industrious, serious, humorous, sometimes beautiful and sometimes homely – not as the media portray them.
The best way to do that, she discovered, was to photograph them at work. In addition to the black-and-white photos that fill her book, she came away with a raft of stories about life on the road and people she wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Many of them worked in the shadow of technological change. At a foundry in Erie, Pa., she photographed a man who is among the last in the country to hand- pour molten metal into a bucket for transport to a holding furnace. In most factories, that process is automated.
Robots did much of the work at a Saturn automobile factory, where she caught an autoworker on the assembly line.
“I wanted to find occupations where the hand of man was not going to be there in five years,” Hauber said.
Many of her models said their efforts are unappreciated by the companies for whom they work. A steady paycheck bound most of them to their jobs.
Craftspeople such as the silversmith were most likely to express satisfaction with their work.
“One of the main things I learned was that if people have a lot of control in their jobs, they tend to be happier,” she said.
Silver Spectrum, the book’s small publishing house, looks for works that make a social statement.
“We felt there was great value in the images that Christine captured,” wrote Jennifer Thompson, the publisher’s editorial manager, in an e-mail. “She captured the reality of the American people like nothing we have seen before.”
Hauber traveled with her black cat, named for photographer Ansel Adams, and her dog, Gracie.
Even the animals had something to teach her, she said. Ansel was cautious about leaving the RV, but the apricot- color poodle bounded from the motor home ready to greet whatever the day had to offer.
“I would watch Grace and say, ‘That is the best way to live life.’ Most people tend to be more like Ansel. I am trying to be a little bit more like Gracie,” she said.
Her home was the 29-foot RV, and she avoided hotels, instead pulling into truck stops or the parking lots of retailers such as Wal-Mart to sleep.
She arrived at truck stops in the daylight and washed her laundry and took care of any other business so she could be safely back in her RV before dark.
The trip cost about $1,100 a month, and though she had some savings when she started, Hauber was soon swimming in debt.
Now, she is home, in Denver, promoting her book and resurrecting her portrait business. It will take some time to repay the money.
“I tell people it was my ‘student of life’ loan,” she said.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
