Filing into a classroom for a lecture isn’t usually fun, so as I took my seat to listen to Wing Young Huie’s talk this Tuesday night, I wasn’t particularly excited. Huie is a photographer, was raised in Minnesota and is now internationally and nationally acclaimed for his pictures — that’s all I knew.

What I wasn’t expecting was to be so utterly inspired by a guy I’d just met, a relative stranger. When he told the room that he got his first camera in the middle of college I was impressed to know that someone so good at what they do didn’t get started until they were already in the thick of college, working towards a different sort of degree.

Huie was born in Minnesota and grew up in Duluth, he graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota and discovered a passion for photography while in school. He decided that he wanted to become a street photographer after taking a workshop from Garry Winogrand, a prominent American street photographer who captured scenes of U.S. life and its societal issues.

While being shown pictures Huie has taken, we were asked to think about the people in them. There were newborn babies, grumpy old men, a skateboarder, mothers with their children and dozens of others. I wondered how someone could walk right up to people they don’t know and ask them to be so real for a camera.

“I’m not that friendly, I’m not unfriendly, I’m just like everyone,” said Huie.

Huie also described himself as “a fly on the wall, observing humanity,” and from that vantage point, he can surely see a lot of things.

In his pictures, people aren’t staged, they all look suspended in time. Some sit in their living rooms or on their front steps, others in a classroom or at a bus stop.

Those gathered to hear this lecture were asked if they could identify with some of the photos and what they thought about the people in them. To be honest, I felt like I couldn’t identify with most of the people.

I don’t have much in common with a skateboarder who has prosthetic legs or a sixth grader wearing a head covering; but I felt I could make a lot of assumptions about them. After discussing his pictures, we would hear about some of the people in them, and I learned that a lot of my assumptions were far from the truth.

As I sat listening to this lecture in Solon Campus Center I looked around and saw a lot of people I didn’t know. Yet when we were asked questions it was clear that we had similar experiences, thoughts and assumptions.

Many of the people in the room had tried their hand at photography or wanted to pursue passions outside of the classroom. On a deeper level, many shared Huie’s personal experiences of feeling “different” or “other” in their communities.

As the only Asian student in the Duluth school district for many years and the only member of his family not born in China, Huie has grappled with ideas of race, community, and otherness for many years. His experience with these themes can be explored in a number of his published works.

“We are all strangers,” Huie said, but his pictures showed me that we can learn so much from each other.

I felt inspired by Huie’s ability to get out of his comfort zone and get to know someone new through a photograph, so at the end of the lecture I went up to someone new and asked to take his picture.

Portrait of Wing Young Huie by Sarah Brown

Creative Piece: Wing Young Huie; Seeing Strangers