When I called Irma with Jan Ramsey's good word, it didn't take her long to nonchalantly accept to pose for the project. At that time, a friend was letting me use his car, but I didn't know for sure when it would be available. So Irma kindly offered to pick me up and drive to the French Quarter where I had spotted a couple of walls on Dauphine Street (Irma lives several miles away from the French Quarter, in New Orleans East).
In the first wall, I could see a face (a little scary, but still...) and was trying to get some sort of an interaction between Irma and the "face" (upper right on the photo).
Then I decided to move one house over to the right and snapped a few more pictures. All along, I was talking to Irma while taking pictures, which she didn't realize, so by the time I was done, she thought we hadn't started yet!
Irma's photo for the book came from the second wall. As soon as I applied the double-exposure, I knew it was a keeper. However, I didn't know how Irma would react to it (it's purposely blurry and you can't see her face all that well). So when I went back a few months later to get her story, I showed her the photo and thankfully she was fine with it (By-the-way, not everyone got to see their photo before the book came out).
Irma is another one of those who knew exactly which story they would share for the book. With all the "models" I tried as much as possible to get stories everyone could somehow relate to, hence avoiding the "fame" thing. This wasn't an issue with Irma. I found her to be humble and straight forward. In the last paragraph of her story, Irma shares that getting her diploma was more important to her than winning her Grammy Award. I was all packed up and ready to go when she said that, but the comment made such an impression on me that I took my little recorder out again and asked her to repeat the phrase. It's written in the book just as it came out of her mouth.
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