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Description
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People often ask me how I get to take such an intimate picture? Here’s my recipe: ever since my first year on the road, I had frequently been staying with Dorothy Yates, a big, fat mama in the Philadelphia ghetto. Her 14-year-old daughter Renee was fascinated by my vagabond stories and always pestering me to take her with me on the road. When she turned 16, I finally gave her permission, if she got her mother’s written permission. I knew how the police would react to a white hitchhiker with a black girl, but apart from endless sexual assaults by white truck drivers the trip went fine.
Traveling through the South for a month, we built up a deep intimacy with each other, sharing beds or floor space every night. When I brought her back, as I’d promised her mother, Renee was so happy to see her boyfriend again that they jumped straight into bed. And because of the intimacy we now had, she never gave a second thought to my photographic presence during the entire act. So this is how you take pictures like this: just invite the subject hitchhiking with you for a month until she is ready.
1727 Manton St, Philadelphia, PA - November 1975
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