Long Time Coming: The 30-Day Job Profile

Our last two assignments in Picture Story are the video job profile and the 30-Day Story. I give to you now the 30-Day Job Profile (I also did the 30-Day Character Profile earlier this semester), which has been in the works since the second week of October. I wish I could just submit this for the actual end-of-term project, since it’s been a real marathon trying to find a subject who’ll stay with the project…but oh well.

Here is a story about a team of ocularists (people who make artificial eyes) in St. Louis. I hope it manages to showcase without being boring, and if it IS boring, please tell me so I can make it better. As always, making the final project better is the ultimate goal.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B7aLuA6sSQ]

More on this whole profile saga is under the cut, as I’m guessing people don’t want to read my ramblings-on.

The video is not the best piece of cinematography ever, and it’s not going to win any awards or set lofty photojournalism standards, but it is the a) most personal work I’ve ever done, b) the project I’ve fought hardest for to get access, and c) the subject I’ve stuck with the longest- I’m way too guilty of abandoning potential projects because subjects didn’t get back to me in time for deadlines.

I think a lot of the reason I stuck with this is because I was so shocked to hear the initial reaction from the first ocularist I contacted. There are two offices in STL, and when I called the first one, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to film the process of making fake eyes because no patient would ever let me, plain and simple. People were “very sensitive” about that kind of thing; they didn’t want others to know they were missing an eye. Or so I was told.

I’ve been blind in my left eye since I was born (I don’t have an optic nerve), and that eye was taken out when I was 22 months old because it was shrunken and small, and would never grow. If I hadn’t been fitted with a prosthesis, I’d have grown up with a squashed, collapsed-in socket and a teeny little blind eye that was doing me no good at all. The artificial eye is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me; I wasn’t raised to think of it as something to be ashamed of, and was completely blown away by the idea that, apparently, a lot of people are. It didn’t make sense that the eye, something that does such good, could be seen as stigmatized. That made it seem even MORE important for me to do a project of some sort.

So while I was still reeling from the first conversation, the other St Louis practicioner called me back (needless to say, I was excited), and said that they would be more than happy to work with me. They weren’t sure how long it would take to find patients who were okay with me filming, but they would do their best, and get back to me. This seemed much more reasonable. The only problem was that it took about a month to set everything up.

I skipped class this past Monday, went to the Cook office, and watched as two patients (one elderly man, one young toddler) had their prostheses worked on. It turns out that one of the ocularists is himself blind in one eye, which is how he got started in the business. When he was younger, he couldn’t get jobs because his eye made him an insurance risk (he would, however, later got his pilot’s license). Again, I had never heard of anything like this. The ADA really was an amazing, giant step forward.

These ocularists use a different method of making the eyes than I’m used to, so I wish I could have fit in the entire process…but I had to cut some parts out in order to make it a reasonable length. This way of doing it seems very old-school, what with the seemingly antiquated molds for the acrylic and wax, and the whole ‘cook the molds in boiling water’ stage. To me it makes the process stand out as the craft that it is.

Anyway. Hope you enjoyed the first draft; I’m sure I’ll be tweaking things sometime in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for watching/reading.