Minneapolis/St. Paul

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Washed-up cowboys, lady mechanics, homeless philosophers--photographer Wing Young Huie has seen it all. Now, by hanging 600 of his Lake Street portraits in public, he's ready to show the city to itself.

On the first legitimately warm day of spring, I went for a long walk down Lake Street and tried to keep my eyes open. Here's what I saw: a woman of indeterminate age, wild-eyed, toothless, head shaved bald, standing in the middle of traffic; a young man curled around a pay-phone receiver trying to make out the sound of his lover's voice; two white-haired ladies steering electric wheelchairs intently against each other like jockeys fighting for inside position; a mother balancing an infant and a Kmart bag on her hips; a giant man shuddering through a back alley; a pair of women wrapped in maroon saris, dreaming of someplace far away from here; people smiling when they didn't think anyone was looking; a Labrador who'd slipped his leash to sniff and paw in a bed of flowers; the sun-splashed calm of a graveyard; the fissures in the sidewalk through which weeds grow; a mission church; a father leading his baby across the street by the hand; gulls diving around an vacant lot, picking at plastic bags and old newspapers swirling in the breeze.

Geographically speaking, Lake Street proper is the six-mile artery between the Mississippi River to the east and Lake Calhoun to the west. It's not a neighborhood in any accurate sense--mostly a tangle of low-slung churches and liquor stores, seedy bars and bodegas wedged shoulder to shoulder. There's something peculiarly American about this present-tense jumble: If you don't like where you're standing, walk 50 yards in any direction and you'll be someplace new. A long swath of the street, between Minnehaha and 27th avenues, is run-down, and after 8:00 p.m., when the lights of the used-car lots go out and traffic thins to a slow ebb, it's one of the darkest places in the city. There is a billboard at the east end of the street that reads "Prepare to Meet Thy God." At night, it feels less like an invitation than a warning.

The photographer Wing Young Huie has been mapping the topography of Lake Street for the past four years. He has learned its terrain inch by inch and recorded its manic rhythms by night and by day. He has made thousands of exposures of those who live and work and wander on the street. He has spent hundreds of hours talking to them and listening to them talk about themselves. And it's all been mere preparation for his cartographic masterwork, perhaps the strangest, most ambitious public art exhibit ever to grace an American city. At six miles, it's certainly the longest.

Over the next few months, Huie's photographs, the Lake Street USA project, will begin to appear in the front windows of stores along the thoroughfare. There will be only a few at first, and no one will pay much attention. But they will multiply, and by midsummer there will be 600 images installed on the street, most 11 inches by 17 inches, with some measuring 12 feet by 8 feet. They will be portraits--of poets, and homeless kids, and congregations praying, and old folks puttering around their homes, and Somali immigrants, and salesmen, and pierced, painted anarchists, and aging cowboys. Some people will look carefully and read the captions beneath the photos, which describe the lives of Huie's subjects. Some will see themselves reflected, and some will see a reflection of themselves they don't recognize. Some will contribute mustaches and horns with black marker. There will be too many faces to ignore and, slowly, people on the street will begin to take notice.

"It's endless," Huie is saying. "Every business is a subculture, everything's in flux. Lake Street is what America is becoming. But there are people who don't want to face the reality."

We're threading the byways of downtown Minneapolis in the photographer's battered Saab, the first surge of the afternoon commute pushing us forward. "The New York Times Magazine called me looking for photos of immigrants. Someone who looks like an immigrant doing something really American--like, I don't know, eating a hot dog in front of the flag. I started thinking, What is American? Is there such a thing? There's a popular media perception of what America is. But is that it?"

Huie is in an uncharacteristically reflective mood. Through the hours we've spent talking over the last few weeks, he has rarely suggested that his work represents anything more sociologically significant than an honest photo album of life on Lake Street. I've come to recognize that he isn't just being coy or self-consciously enigmatic in the way that artists sometimes are. He doesn't explain his work, because, on some level, he can't. The Lake Street USA project is too expansive, its significance too elusive. To couch this grand enterprise in the terms of a sociopolitical agenda, Huie believes, would be to constrict it, to cheapen its possibility. And he holds great faith in possibility.

At the moment, however, he is groggy from a late-night birthday party the evening before (his 45th). He hasn't been sleeping well, he admits, and when he does he is troubled by dreams of failure. "I feel like I'm having a meltdown," he says. "There's so much more I wanted to photograph. I have to back off a little. Can't worry so much about the details."

The logistics are indeed staggering. There are hundreds of photos to print, enlarge, and install in storefront windows and on bus-stop shelters. There are skeptical business owners to convince that the pictures won't be too provocative, too political, too black, too white, too big, too personal, or too arty (all of which they will, to some extent, be). There are corporate flacks to bypass, and city officials to entreat. There is a book deal to work out with St. Paul's Ruminator Press, and an online catalog to design. (A collection of Huie's Lake Street photos ran in City Pages September 10, 1997.) There is still $50,000 to raise--roughly half the exhibit's total budget. There is a stack of unlicked fundraising envelopes waiting back at Huie's south Minneapolis studio that would tax any mortal's salivary capacity. There are minutiae of tone and contrast to resolve with the printers, which is where we're now headed.

The photographer's print shop of choice, Photos Inc., is located in a squat office building in a West Bank industrial park. We park the car and move inside. Wing is five-foot-ten, slender, and complexly freckled, which, when added to his stoop-shouldered gait, simultaneously points to much time spent outside in the sun and many hours bent over in the false twilight of the darkroom. While working, he favors jeans and open flannel shirts. His hair is buzzed militarily short. He is often very quiet, and his eyes, which are dark and focused, suggest great reserves of patience. When he does speak, it is in an evenly modulated voice that must put the subjects of his photos at immediate ease, coax them into opening themselves to the camera's cycloptic gaze. In casual conversation, though, he often seems to be only half-present, as though the bulk of his attention is devoted to some private calculation.

Inside the shop Huie stops to chat with the receptionist. He's been making the trip to Photos Inc. at least twice a week for the past month to check on the progress of the printing, which is costing $40,000 and is thus a source of constant anxiety, and he now knows nearly everyone here. The office and print shop are done in institutional white and smell faintly of chemicals. After a minute or two we go through a set of double doors, where Roger, the Photos Inc. printer who has been working almost exclusively with Huie, rolls out the most recent edition of the exhibit's signature 12-foot-by-8-foot portrait.

The big picture: 12-by-8-foot photos on the former Sears building PHOTO BY TEDDY MAKI

The picture, one of the first Huie took when he began shooting more than three years ago, is of a woman and child. He met them, he recalls, at a Martin Luther King Day celebration in Powderhorn Park. The woman is wearing a black overcoat and is holding the child close, almost wrapping her in its folds. When Huie first saw the negatives, he says, the pose reminded him of a kangaroo holding a joey in its pouch. The photo also recalls something else: The woman's gaze is focused straight at the camera, while the girl's eyes are averted up and to her right. It's an uncanny approximation of the iconographic Madonna and child.

But something isn't right. Huie has been playing with tonal variations, trying to heighten the portrait's contrast so that it will be clearly visible from yards away. Ideally, the dual-tone print will be richer and warmer than one done in straight black ink. In this incarnation, however, the sepia tint is too strong. It overpowers the contrast between the figures and the background, and even from a few feet away the photo looks washed out and indistinct. Huie smoothes the glossy paper with one hand and stares glumly. This means another printing, and the project's unofficial public debut, which he has taken to calling his D-day, is only two weeks away.

Huie's studio is located on the second floor of a converted bakery building on the modest, tree-fringed edge of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. It's an airy, well-lighted space and would be very roomy except that it now appears to have been requisitioned as the headquarters for a minor military operation. A hand-drawn map of Lake Street covered in nests of colored pushpins takes up most of one wall. The room itself is occupied almost exclusively by wheeled bulletin boards, which are covered by most of the exhibit's photos, along with printed excerpts from the interviews Huie recorded to accompany them. In the background, Elvis Presley is warbling "Stuck on You."

This morning, the photographer is on the phone with a city official, negotiating the release of ten bus-stop shelters along Lake Street. The woman sounds tinny and far away over speakerphone. Huie, who is wearing black jeans and a black shirt, has crossed his elbows over his chest and has a look of intense consternation. He suddenly seems like the sort of person who would make a formidable chess opponent. "My crystal ball is real foggy," the official is saying. "August and September are real busy for us." The bus stops--which Huie conceived of as supplements to the storefront displays--are going to be somewhat more difficult to secure than he'd first thought.

Huie has been living in the studio for the past two years, although the signs of regular human occupancy have been mostly swallowed by Lake Street-related flotsam and jetsam: stacks of envelopes, photos strung out along the walls like Christmas lights, forgotten Post-It notes. The darkroom, which is shrouded in black cloth, is adjacent to the kitchen, where dishes wait patiently in the sink above a small stash of half-empty liquor bottles. A living space, less than ten-feet square, has been carved out of the center of the room and furnished with a couch, a television, and an overflowing bookshelf. There are few personal effects that don't relate to Huie's work. Even the studio's sleeping quarters, tucked in a small alcove near the rear of the room, are only a few feet from an aqua iMac computer; you can imagine him working on the project in his sleep.

The studio's resident felines--one tabby, one black--are wound together in a patch of sunlight. Sprawled around them is Huie's crew: one full-time assistant, a friendly young woman named Alison Ziegler; and a squadron of college-age interns. They've spent the last week soliciting window space from businesses along Lake Street, and are now exchanging anecdotes. "The guy asked me, 'Got any pictures of black people?' Then he goes, 'Well, if we have a black and a Mexican, I suppose we need an Asian.' 'What about white people?' I asked him. 'I guess we'll need one of those, too.'

The morning's business is curating the exhibit--meticulously choosing which photos will end up where. Laid out in no particular order, the montage is disorienting; the effect is like looking into a swaying, stirring crowd and trying to pick out a friendly face. The variety, too, induces a pleasurable vertigo: Here is an old urban cowboy shuffling across a busy intersection; a man in a gorilla costume, captured at the Uptown Art Fair; a used-car salesman 20 years past the best day of his life; an American Indian muralist keeping his eyes on the sky like El Greco's Jesus; a congregation worshiping in a shadow-cooled mosque; a Tibetan monk at rest; a barrel-chested man holding a tiny puppy between two meaty fingers; a kid with gravity-defying hair lifting his shirt to show off a tattoo that announces "Punk is not dead" (except the tattoo artist must have taken liberties, because it actually looks like "Pank is not deak").

Some of the images are overtly political. One is of a figure pushing a shopping cart full of soda cans beneath a McDonald's arch that reads "Billions and billions served." Another finds a homeless man, face scarred to the texture of beaten leather, sitting in front of the Heart of the Beast puppet theater's marquee, which is advertising a show titled "Between the Worlds. Songs of Dark and Light." A steel lamppost cuts the frame into two, so that the man is centered in one and the marquee lights are in the other. It's deep winter, and as Huie shot the photo the day was dying quickly. "My name is Psycho," the man tells us.

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