John.

It's the face everyone thinks they know: the eagle on the coins, the one on the symbol. Head and neck of white feathers, a hooked beak of intense yellow, yellow eyes that never look away. Over it, black biker's leather and a silver chain at the neck, against a gray-green background that doesn't distract from what matters. On a wall, it commands the room before you even get close. It has all the thunderous look of a people everyone assumes are forever fierce and grand.

Behind that cover there's a quiet man who spends his days fixing things. Onto his bench comes a guitar given up for dead, warped, with a worn-down fret, and a week later it leaves sounding again. He doesn't shout: he tunes. Half of Duluth's music scene plays instruments that came out of his workshop, on the shore of Lake Superior, where the cold slips under the door for a good part of the year. The look says one thing; the man, another. That contrast is what hangs on the wall. He's part of Animal Kinhood, my series of portraits, which I sign as Yago Partal.