The personal and community allure of “the third place”

Photojournalists often will move kinetically through a scene. Like a postmodern dancer interpreting society’s hunger for visual stimuli, they’ll get close to their subjects, then quickly move far away, take a vertical for the magazine cover, then back to horizontals, leap down to get a low shot, climb to a high shot, a detail, a portrait, a left-facing action shot, then right. To make a picture essay have rhythm and flow, it needs variety. But the frenetic pursuit of variety will fall flat when the subject is more complex, more vibrant, more multilayered than the photographer has tricks to frame it.

To photograph the enormous, swirling East Oakland flea market known as “La Pulga” for local newsroom El Tímpano, Report for America and CatchLight photojournalist Hiram Alejandro Durán turned to a typological approach. The typology is an approach to photography as old as the medium itself, where the camera records a straightforward and repetitive composition. The subject in each image changes, but nothing else, thus intricately describing the uniqueness of each subject. ?

Another key factor in El Tímpano’s decision to report on La Pulga has to do with the importance of “third places” among immigrant communities. Simply put, if home is your first place, and work is your second, then where you hang out is your third place. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989, articulating the characteristics of a place where people can relax and recreate in public. ?One of those characteristics is that the space must place no importance on an individual’s socioeconomic status, and be accommodating to everybody.

“It costs like a dollar or two to go to La Pulga. Given it’s the Bay Area, that’s a significantly reduced price compared to a lot of other local entertainment,” Durán said. ?“A lot of people do go to La Pulga to shop and use it for its intended purpose. But a lot of people also just go there to hang out and have a couple of Micheladas, just indulging in the vibe of the whole place.”

Durán’s photos capture the wide variety of vendors at La Pulga, each one contributing to the allure of the place for the different nationalities that visit the market. “They sell all kinds of foods from Latin America and Central America,” Durán said. “One of the guys, Hilario, that we focused on for the story is from Oaxaca, and he sells pretty much only products from Oaxaca. ?People from Oaxaca go specifically there on the weekends, to buy produce and snacks from him that they're familiar with.”

Hiram’s pictures are not the rigid typology typical of mid-20th Century German artists. Rather, it is a looser use of the technique, but to perhaps greater effect, reflecting the freewheeling nature of the outdoor market.

“The inspiration started around (Report for America and CatchLight photographer) Ximena Natera’s Juneteenth pictures from the year before, using a photo booth that was a semi-permanent presence in a community event,” Durán said. “I wanted to photograph the patrons against a blue background - those are our colors at El Tímpano. Also Carlos Jaramillo’s zine Tierra Del Sol - he uses a blue backdrop for photos. The booths are all built and brought down the same day. They do this 364 days a year - I wanted the visuals to reflect that consistency.”

In such a colorful, loud, frenetic space, there is a lot of competition among the vendors for attention, and the El Tímpano team had to strategize to get people into their photo booth. Using an instant camera both made the pictures more visually consistent and also allowed Durán to offer his subjects an instant print from their portrait session.

“I took two photos of everybody - one for them and one for us,” Durán said. ?“Meanwhile the reporters are recording interviews while the pictures develop. I think just being a little cheeky, a little unserious about it helped, because that's kind of the nature of La Pulga. Convincing folks that we're trying to do what is essentially a love letter to La Pulga. And people really resonated with that and wanted to participate because they could see the little wall of portraits that I was building.”

The service that La Pulga provides for Bay Area residents echoes with Durán’s past, and the few third places he had available. “Growing up in El Paso - my family had moved there from Juárez not too long before my birth and for the majority of their lives I feel like my older relatives have not really found community. For me, I’d say my third place was a pool at Marty Robbins Park, in El Paso during middle school. That's where me and my friends would go and plunge ourselves into deeply chlorinated water almost every day,” Durán said. “People would look at us like, why are you guys like here every day? Because we're … poor. We don't have money for a pool at home.”?

Hiram said his aunt worked three jobs and sometimes paid for his family to go to the movies or get dinner together in El Paso.

“But besides that, I didn't really have any third place. I kind of went through the same processes my older relatives did, like things aren't necessarily built for you. Things weren't made for you and for your community,” Durán said. “But (La Pulga) happens literally every day, and it's built by members of the community, and they get to shape it. It makes people in the Latino communities and immigrant communities feel so much more welcomed.”

[See more of?Durán's work]

By Ben Brody