With a quiet stance and an unimposing gaze, Henry Barrios can threaten your ideas of truth and scare your honesty out into the public eye. By the delicacy one uses to seize and liberate a butterfly from one’s palm, Barrios can capture and display your inner self, and there is nothing left to blame but reality when beauty and crudeness overpower stereotype.
Barrios will gracefully pillage the roads of illusion with one picture, but there is a price to pay; his stories stick to him, his emotions haunt him. Ah, the curses and the rewards of being a photographer.
“I don’t try to fool myself into thinking I can’t get attached to a story,” he said, “What I try to do is seek the truth, to be honest.”
Working for The Bakersfield Californian, Barrios has his virtues of photography set: honesty and truth.
Honesty comes with vulnerability, however, and he knows this from experience.
On an assignment he later titled “Meth’s Human Toll,” he went along with a fellow reporter to a problem area in Bakersfield where he met Carrie Scoggans, a meth addict with plenty of problems. Barrios’s assignment entailed numerous pictures of Carrie’s life, including touching moments with her three young children, and her struggle to start a life sober in Tabitha’s Drug Rehabilitation Center.
The pictures Barrios took were intimate: Tight face shots of Carrie’s son, his innocent blue eyes filling up the screen. A distressed Carrie in a shambled room on a tiny unmade bed with her giddy young daughter. And the syringe, the embodiment of all her troubles.
“She was just in terrible distress,” he said.
Yet for him, distress can come from both sides of the camera, as Barrios felt from his most memorable editorial experience. He was sent to document eye doctors that traveled to Mexico to help and practice on the most financially unfortunate.
He recollects moments as these with a nostalgic pause as evident in him as in his photographs.
“There was this blind man walking down the street and his brother was leading him,” he said. “The sun was going down, I just like those really quiet moments.”
Having been in the game for more than 20 years, Barrios realizes that photojournalism and emotion are not insoluble.
“It’s human,” he said. “You can look at a photograph and capture the feeling of an event as the photographer saw it.”
Barrios can see with a quiet reverence and undying enthusiasm. Still photography and the legendary Watergate incident inspired him to be part of a business that he says brings closeness between his subjects and him.
“I used to think that I didn’t [put my opinion] in my photographs,” said Barrios, “but my background, my beliefs growing up, it influences me.”
With no hint of insistence, a photograph creation of Barrios’s can perhaps influence those who see it as well.