SPANISH FORT, Ala. — Old. Young.

Black. White.

Healthy. Infirmed.

Middle class. Homeless.

For six years, Michael Nye has met the faces of hunger.

But each of the 30 people profiled in the San Antonio artist’s latest traveling, interactive exhibit shares one thing beyond the gnawing need for sustenance.

That need — at times — has reduced each person to tears, anger, hopelessness and guilt.

The faces — and more important, the voices — chronicled in Nye’s “About Hunger and Resilience” opening Oct. 7 at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope resonate with determination that lays bare the triumph of the human spirit.

Nye’s interactive, traveling documentary debuted earlier this year at San Antonio’s Witt Museum and arrives on the Eastern Shore for a five-week run through the efforts of Prodisee Pantry. The Spanish Fort-based emergency food and assistance organization will host a series of events in tandem with the exhibit designed to boost community awareness about hunger and its local impact.

Nye, who began his professional career as a lawyer, turned to fine-arts photography as a means of raising awareness about social issues and has already completed traveling national gallery showings on both teenage pregnancy and mental illness.

“About Hunger” affected him in a way he never suspected possible, though.

“These are honest stories about the lives affected and personal nature of hunger,” he said of the photography and audio exhibit. “Personal stories are a way to get underneath the issues. Empathy and understanding resonate in a powerful way and help people connect on levels they never imagined possible.

It’s also an opportunity to step out of one’s life and into the life of another.”

Nye has traveled the world searching for stories that exemplify the human experience, but the hunger he found closest to home struck a chord he simply could not ignore.

“All my projects have really been about wanting to know more about human nature, more about ourselves,” he said, calling hunger a human-rights issue and marveling at how such a small word can have such a devastating impact.

“Hunger should be a huge word, like hippopotamus or Mississippi. It can be such a powerful yet ambiguous concept. We all hunger for something. But to meet someone who has been so hungry they have cried . . . when that happens, everything is falling apart in that person’s life,” Nye said.

The artist contacted food banks, churches and charitable organizations such as the Spanish Fort-based pantry in search of people willing to share their personal struggles in an intimate medium. After spending two to three days with each subject, Nye whittled as many as 10 hours of interviews down to as few as five minutes of commentary to offer a poignant snapshot of one person’s experience. He then took their portraits with a Civil War-era camera, and visitors to the exhibit can wear headphones and hear first-hand accounts of the underlying reasons for and personal battles in overcoming hunger.

“There’s that old saying about giving someone a fish and feeding them for a day, but if you teach them to fish you’re feeding them for a whole lifetime, and that is so misleading,” he said. “It gives the impression that if you are hungry you don’t have any skills, that you’re not working hard, that you’re just lazy … I think that if you listen to some of these stories, you come away with a better idea of what it is to be human.”   

Editor’s Note: This is the second in an ongoing series highlighting “About Hunger and Resilience,” a national traveling exhibit opening Oct. 7 at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope.

The interactive photographic and audio exhibit includes the stories of four Baldwin County families, and a series of community events has been organized around the five-week show to raise awareness about the issue.