D.C. Street Photos Tell Stories All Their Own

'Bling Bling' Backgrounds Let Partiers Instantly Upgrade Their Images

Betty Robinson inspects an image on the back of a digital camera with photographer Howard Corbin before having it printed and placed in a cardboard frame. (Photos Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)

First they stop at the rendering of two bottles of Moet floating under a full moon. Then they decide to pose in front of the image of the Aston Martin roadster, airbrushed in brilliant black on an oversize canvas.

She smiles, hand on her husband's chest. He chews gum, deadpan cool beneath a Bullets cap.

"Okay, y'all. On three," says Darrin Clark, known as the Pictureman to patrons of his nocturnal photo studio -- a dank Florida Avenue NW parking lot now bright with his lights.

For $10 the couple departs with a memento of their Saturday night, a color photograph stapled inside a white cardboard frame.

The District is famous for its stock of monumental backdrops that lure tourists from worlds away. What the Pictureman offers instead are images of unfettered opulence -- Hummers and champagne bottles and sweeping stairways that lead to a shower of stars.

His backdrops are the world of the "bling bling," as the finer things in life are celebrated in the culture of hip-hop and rap music. "The things people can't afford," said Jamar McNeil, the deejay known as J-Nice on Hot 99.5-FM. "You can take a picture in front of a Rolls Royce even if you don't own one. It's ghetto fabulous, like when you're broke but looking good."

Instant portraiture such as Clark's has long been a staple of the black music scene, not only in the District but in such cities as New York, where cameramen, as they call themselves, have hung backdrops outside the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem.

In the Washington region, cameramen can be found at go-go clubs and strip joints, at the MCI Center and at private house parties and cabarets. What distinguishes Clark from his peers is geography, his spot being at the hub of the District's nightlife, on Seventh Street NW, just south of Howard University Hospital and east of the clubs along U Street.

Getting photographed is "instant gratification," said Clark, 36, pausing for a moment between customers. "A portrait studio? That's too expensive for a lot of people. They want the picture instantly. They come, they're done."

He and Reggie Cooper, 32, have been taking pictures during weekends for more than a decade, arriving after 10 p.m. and staying as late as 4 a.m., long after the CVS and the Popeyes and the flower shop across the street shut down.

"They're there after most sane people go to bed, and they're gone before they get up," said Stanley J. Mayes, chair of the 3rd District police Chief's Citizens Advisory Council. "Most people don't even know they exist."

Over the years, the parking lot has become a regular weekend stop for many black Washingtonians, a place to commemorate a birthday, anniversary or night out. A place for nurses and sanitation workers and young toughs wielding wads of cash -- and sometimes guns -- to bask in the bright lights.

"I'm a doll, baby. I'm a beauty queen," purred Tasha Howerton, 24, all legs and hips and sunglasses as she preened in front of a Mercedes backdrop. Her companion, Andre Stanton, 41, grinned as he watched sleepily from the wheel of his SUV, apparently oblivious to the faint odor of people relieving themselves wafting over the lot.

"It's like being at the Grammys," he said. "Ten years from now, you can say you were at Seventh and Florida, you dig?"