He used to panhandle on Dupont Circle in the early 80s. That was where I’d get off from the subway at the end of the day when I worked at the Library of Congress, and he was one of the people I’d always stop to talk to before I made my way back home to Mt. Pleasant. This was during a brief period in the 80s when I would take a lot of photographs, and of course one day I happened to have my camera with me when I stopped to chat with him. That’s when I took this photograph. A couple of weeks later, when I had it developed, I gave him a copy. “Oh, that’s beautiful, man,” he said and he smiled more than I’d ever seen him smile before. Though, now that I think of it, maybe I had never seen him smile at all before then. He really seemed to like his portrait. He called himself “Om.”
-Jose Padua
Photograph by Jose Padua