One of the under-appreciated duties as the teacher of the yearbook class was covering Saturday morning track meets. I mean, after five irritating, often-mind numbing days dealing with middle-school crises and dysfunction, the idea of voluntarily giving up ones Saturday seemed downright stupid. I guess I didn’t know any better and busied myself taking pictures all morning of our team members hanging out together in the stands, the starts of different races, and anything that might look a little interesting. 

At the end of the last lap of the 880 race the stadium crowd started to cheer as the winning runners began to cross the finish line. Then the crowd took notice of the last runner, a little sixth grader, as he rounded the last turn. Even though he was dozens of yards behind everyone else he hadn’t given up. And as his labored jog began to increase in speed the cheers started to go up. The crowd then rose to their feet as this determined runner started to sprint down the final straight-away for the finish. The crowd and the runner became one. They cheered louder and he ran harder. By the time he reach the finish line the noise was deafening and he had given everything he had. 

He wasn’t even on my school’s team, but I shot off pictures like he was an Olympic champion. It was the most perfect unmanufactured example of the human spirit I’d seen in years. One of the reasons I’m here, on my own time, is for moments just like this, when I get to catch these bigger than life events. Nothing chokes me up as much as the unadulterated power of that crowd screaming at the top of their lungs for this little last place runner in an unimportant middle school track meet. I love when my camera catches moments like this, when the human spirit shows itself. I have one other favorite photograph from when I was yearbook teacher. 

I needed to get a group photo of the student council members and outside our gym was a big wall with the school motto on it. I had the students and their advisor line up along the wall, but there were too many of them for a single line along the wall. So I had them divide themselves into three rows with some of them sitting on the ground in front. I let them sit or stand with their friends and waited for them to relax a little bit before taking the picture. After a few minutes they were comfortable enough to joke with each other, with some of them making faces at each other. I waited just long enough for them to relax enough for their different personalities to show. The advisor wasn’t too happy because they weren’t standing up straight or even all looking at the camera and smiling. But they were showing me and my camera who they were in that moment with their friends, just being kids. Like the little runner responding to the cheering crowd who was responding to his efforts, I love when I’m able to catch others just being themselves, that they would trust me enough to let me see them, in that one moment.  JBB

2007 Demille Student Council

Resources:

Tags: being seen, Joe Bustillos photography, Joe Bustillos short stories, through my lens, writing projects 

Creative Commons License

JosephBruceBustillos.com (website) by Joseph Bruce Bustillos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License