Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. Hey, my name is Alex Workman. My wife and I are photographers, filmmakers, and storytellers here in Teller Hassey, Florida. Well, quarantine was like the worst nightmare in for me because I am an extrovert. My wife jokes that I could become friends with a wall. And so a couple of months after the world shut down, we launched a project called COVID Wear, where we photographed about 250-ish people in our garage, dressed from the waist up and in their pajamas or underwear or yoga pants or whatever from the waist down. We wanted to do something that poked fun at the season that we were in without being disrespectful to the severity of COVID. Kind of as the pandemic shifted a little bit at the beginning of 2021, I kept having this thought go through my head. The Teller Hassey is a community where people are known of, but not known. And so I caught my wife, I said, babe, I have a crazy idea. I'm gonna have coffee with 100 random people this year. And it was an incredible journey for me because I feel like if we wanna make Teller Hassey a better place, connecting with people we don't know and God forbid we disagree with, that allows us to find grace for one another and find common ground. And that's how we can really build a better community. As I had coffee with people, I just said I was gonna take your portrait because that not only helped keep me accountable, but it was also a way to help me broaden the horizon of people that I might have coffee with. What inspires me is seeing joy in people's faces. I want people to feel beautiful because I believe they are. We oftentimes are told how we should look or how we should act, but oftentimes we aren't encouraged in the confidence in which who we are. And I believe that we're honored and grateful that we've been given a platform and an opportunity to use art to breathe life into people. That's what keeps me going every single day. My name is Alex Sworkman and my wife, Chelsea and I are photographers, filmmakers and storytellers here in Telehassy. You're listening to voices that inspire.