Melvin Sharek

Melvin Sharek is my next-door neighbor. He is the mayor of Savoy Plaza, living the last four or so decades, within walls that have seemed to grow smaller during the years. I first saw Mel one evening while I was sitting on the patio smoking; I looked over at him and smiled, finished my cigarette and went back inside. A couple weeks later again I held the elevator for him while he was checking the mail. We journeyed to the eighth floor; he was quite polite told me to have a good night as I watched him hobble very slowly to his door. When the subject for my outsider tanked on me, I was left furious and very worried, but then I remembered good old Mel who lives inches from us, he always seemed very open and inching to speak so I asked if it would be to much of a bother to invade his space on a Sunday morning to listen to him for a few minutes, his eyes lit up.
Mel will be 80 next year, he has been living alone since his second wife passed on, he calls himself very unlucky in love. He is a veteran of the Korean war, all he showed me from this horrible time were his hands and feet, as Mel has nothing from this moment in his life, his first wife left with everything and has since died as well. His estranged son hasn’t spoken to him for years as he is in and out of hospitals and mental states, while his daughter does the best she can from Texas. Mel avoids looking at me too much, on the first day of our shooting we took over soup, salad and fruit for him, to open up the conversation. His space is constricting, his motion almost to slow for me to capture. He told me a barrage of clean dirty jokes. Humor is an ever constant in his life as it lifts him out of his reality.
The claustrophobic nature of his apartment restricted me very much. I tried to parallel this space restriction and translate it into a vision where there is a tactile revelation of Mel, This reality is at times distorted and very limited. Learning how to maneuver around this small space initially felt very frustrating, I had to give up my sense of control over subject, as Mel isn’t very mobile anymore. I had so many ideas after the initial shoot but mostly I just listened to Mel in the end. I guess that this investigation into his life will take more than three weeks. He is interested in this continuous documentation so I have promised and invested time to him. The old man who hobbled slowly and barely speaks now comes knocking on my door to make sure that I am okay. On Saturday I made some prints and carried them over for him. He was very ill and canceled our last shoot because of the pain, tears weld up in his eyes when he looked at them.
I am no longer an outsider in Mel’s life, he is now my friend, someone who I can listen to and share time with. In the end I think that this project has started something bigger in my life, what is presented here is a minute glimpse as to who he is, there is so much more waiting to come out. Meeting him has challenged my thoughts on age, solitude and abandonment. I know by the end of my time here that a phenomenon much more important than photographs and cataloguing will have come out of our time together.