The Mayor of Skid Row

The outfit comes first. Max Luger met the man on Skid Row and photographed him for The Content Campus. In Max's account the man maintains an outfit and keeps himself, in Max's words, "in such immaculate shape."

Max titled the portrait "The mayor of Skid Row," and he gives two reasons for the name. The man maintains that outfit, and he goes around Skid Row trying to help people. Who first called him the mayor, Max does not say.

Max describes him as "almost like a mentor to the homeless while being homeless himself." In Max's telling, the role and the way the man keeps himself belong together: the outfit and the help arrive in the same sentence.

The rest is harder to see. Max says only two things would tell you the man is homeless: he tells you, as he told Max, and he sleeps on the street.

Then there is the way he talks. Max calls him "an eloquent speaking man who is not defined by his position."

The man's own reason for staying comes through in one thing he said. In conversation, he told Max he does not want to leave Skid Row. He wants to be around, he said, to help guide those who are stuck there. In Max's retelling, they are those "sadly stuck in their position."

In Max's portrait, made on a Skid Row street, he is laughing.

The outfit is what you would see first. Max's account begins with "just a gentleman I met on Skid Row." It ends with that gentleman's reason for staying put. Then Max stops. "That's the story," he says.

“In conversation, he told Max he does not want to leave Skid Row.”