'I Won't Give Up,' Hunting the Kentucky Roadside
A 24-hour photo essay on a man trying to make ends meet + updates!
Hello! Happy *Saturday* morning. I know, I know, I am a bit delayed on this newsletter. Over the last couple weeks here in Kentucky, I have photographed everything from pig wrestling to horse-riding to spending the night with migrant farm workers from Mexico. Over 30,000 photographs in three weeks! A lot has happened, so let me first catch you up on where you can see my work in the coming weeks and months!
First, my photograph, “Opryland Calling,” won Honorable Mention in the September Show at the Alexandria Museum of Art! The show will be up until October in Alexandria, Louisiana. A few days after that honor, I learned of my acceptance into the Eddie Adams Workshop. If you are unfamiliar with the workshop, it is a gold-standard achievement for college photojournalists, with only 1 of every 100 applicants being accepted. 50 students and 50 early-career professionals spend a weekend in upstate New York photographing assignments and getting feedback/portfolio reviews/connections with top photo-editors in the industry.
I am also extremely excited to tease that I have a photo in this year’s Slow Exposures exhibition, which is the premiere show of Southern photography. It has been a bucket-list item of mine to have a photo shown here, as so many of my Southern photographic heroes have done so in the past. I can’t share which photograph will be shown down in Georgia, but keep an eye out for that announcement in the coming weeks.
Finally, here in Kentucky at Boyd’s Station, we had a 24 hour photo-essay competition, which brought in student photojournalists from across the country. We had from Friday at 6 P.M. to Saturday at 6 P.M. to create and submit a photo essay on the theme, “Picking up the Pieces.” I found and followed along with Tommy Fryman, a man who spends everyday walking Cynthiana picking up trash and scrap metal to sell at a local recycling center to make his ends meet. I was honored to have received 1st Place for the photo-essay. I hope Tommy’s story will both open your eyes to the grit and determination he has to keep going (as well as the joy he finds along the way) and spur you to think about what solutions we can find to better help those among us like Tommy, who are doing absolutely everything they can to make it by in a system becoming more and more designed to keep them down. The photo-essay is in full below.
Your email may shorten this message. If so, please click the “View Entire Newsletter” button to continue reading. See you next week with a dispatch from greased pig wrestling!
‘I Won’t Give Up,’ Fryman hunts the Roadside
We start with a partial inventory of what's in Tommy Fryman’s shopping cart, drenched in rain on this stormy Saturday in downtown Cynthiana: over a hundred crushed soda cans, a new pack of diapers, a new window blind, a pool noodle, and 4 pizza pans. Oh, and the chief offenders, two metal pipes. Even with the rope tied around them, they are too big for the cart, extending over a foot over the railing of each side of the cart.
Fryman’s life is a numbers game. 24 cans a pound, 50 cents for a pound of aluminum at Randy’s Odd Jobs Recycling Center. Seven days a week, Fryman walks around town, averaging 10 miles a day, to pick up cans and other goods to sell at Randy’s Odd Jobs Recycling Center to supplement his disability check, which he receives for epilepsy. Cynthiana has no recycling system, and Randy’s business helps Tommy make the ends meet.
Fryman is well known in the community. People stop their cars on the road to give him cans and businesses leave them by their dumpsters. No one bats an eye when Fryman bends over a trash can. The task gets harder everyday. Fryman gets short of breath, and legs frequently buckle and give out. But that won’t deter him from his mission: to clean the streets of Cynthiana and make some honest cash.
“Not many people have a heart like I do,” Fryman said. “And I won’t give up, not until God calls me home.”
“I think it’s going to be too hot to hunt today,” Fryman said, sitting outside his cousin’s home. But within 20 minutes, he was out on the sidewalks with his cart. Fryman sees it as good for him to keep moving, even when he doesn’t feel up to it.
Fryman tosses a can from a residential garbage can into his shopping cart. Fryman seeks permission from homeowners to look through their garbage cans for trash he can recycle, as there is no recycling infrastructure through the city of Cynthiana.
“Somebody else got those cans,” Fryman said. “They’re always stealing everything.” Fryman was told cans were left in bags for him outside his storage unit next to a dumpster, but they were nowhere to be found.
“They just throw the money away,” Fryman said, staring angrily past the counter after watching a gas station customer check out with $75 in lottery tickets. Fryman buys $1 tickets occasionally, but cashier Lisa Philpot only lets him buy a couple. “I’d like him to have his money,” she said. Instead, they bet cokes on aspects of Fryman’s collecting, like how much his cart can carry or how he can maneuver items to fit.
Fryman spent minutes looking at the die-cast cars in the gas station market, counting them up individually to get an overall price. They are $8 a piece, a price he can’t justify. His favorite, which he picked up immediately, is a yellow taxi. “I love it because its doors open and close,” he said.
Fryman has many people’s names tattooed on his arms, from his mom and his dad to his cousins to the wife he had for one day. “I married her, took her to bed, and then annulled it,” Fryman said. “Her brother watched us, and after it was over I asked if he learned anything.” The tattoos help him remember and cherish these family members, as his parents and several of his siblings have passed away.
Fryman puts his belt back on after determining he has no more room in his storage locker. He wraps his keys around his belt loop to ensure he doesn’t lose them while bending over to pick up items along the road or in the trash.
In one of the last stops of the day, Fryman checks the garbage can of the Family Dollar grocery store. Instead of only taking items out, Fryman also trashed an item here: a bottle of medicine. He found it while picking up cans from the gas station parking lot, and he immediately knew he couldn’t keep someone else’s prescription. “Take my picture, that way we have proof that I got rid of it,” Fryman said. As much as making money, he sees his mission as keeping the town clean, from the sidewalks to the trash cans.
Thank you for reading and until next time,
Lukas Flippo