UPDATE: We have confirmed that Zeddie Little grew up here in Charleston, went to the College of Charleston, and worked in a local restaurant for four years. Read more here.
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A photo taken last weekend of a racer at the Cooper River Bridge Run has become an Internet sensation, garnering hundreds of thousands of page views and a plethora of humorous captions. That’s right: Charleston started a meme.
The subject of the photo has come to be known as Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, and the name fits: The runner splits the difference between metro chic and rugged handsomeness, with immaculate facial stubble offset by perfectly feathered hair that the photographer caught floating upward and being kissed by the sun. According to a search of race results based on his bib number, the runner is Zeddie Little, a 25-year-old man from New York City.
So, who is Zeddie Little? Like the John Galt of stock-photo models, Little has acquired legendary status without revealing his true identity just yet. We do know that he finished the race in a respectable 47 minutes and 16 seconds, placing him at 242nd place in his division, but that’s about it for biographical information.
The man who took the photo that started it all is Will King, a computer programmer at the Medical University of South Carolina who lives in Mt. Pleasant. He had friends who ran in the race Saturday, so he woke up early and staked out a spot to take photos on the sidelines near the intersection of Coleman and Houston Northcutt boulevards. King, who has been doing photography as a hobby for about a year and a half, ended up shooting over 600 photos, and he chose about 100 to upload to Flickr and Facebook.
“I didn’t think overall the picture was that great, but I knew that he looked good, so I went ahead and uploaded it,” King says. One of his friends on Facebook commented on the picture, saying, “I dub this Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” and King decided to share the photo — with a short explanation of his friend’s comment — on Reddit. He posted it to the site around lunchtime on Tuesday, and within an hour, it had garnered 300,000 views, he says. The last he checked, the photo had gotten over 1.2 million hits, with people worldwide adding their own captions.
We’re doing our best to find Zeddie Little, and if he does eventually pick up the phone, we’ll barrage him with Seventeen magazine-style personal questions: How do you stay in shape? What’s an ideal date for you? What do you find attractive in a person?
We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, let us know: What other questions do you want answered?
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