Downtown Again

People are funny. First, they're everywhere. Second, barring time fluctuations, false realities, and nit-picks, it's taken about as much time to grow one as it's taken to make a me, if not more. All some billion of us have jobs or families or houses or shacks or corners. Inevitably, you at some point have run into another person. They are everywhere. And so I take pictures of them. I catalogue the species.

I'm not a very patient photographer. That doesn't mean I won't take time to get lighting and framing, but I rarely have time to ask my subject for permission. Not that I want it. If I ask "can I take a picture?" I get this crap where they know the picture is coming and inevitably, someone does something stupid like put their hands up or check their teeth or make a face that resembles nothing like how they look the other 99.9999996% of their day.

So I take out my big zoom lens and get in close on some faces. They're not ready. They're talking. They're kissing. they're fighting. Pedaling. Rowing. Hell, the look like normal people. Most the the people who see me ready to shoot prepare for my camera as though they weren't prepared for the world.

What is it we become aware of with that camera pointed right at us? Our bodies or posture? As though it's the chance for someone else to see you as you do in the mirror? That suddenly we're taking up 1/60th of a second's worth of our 15 minutes of fame?

I see people walk with indifference past crowds that scour them up and down with their eyes. Not a flinch or tremor. But then they see my lens: that baneful, soul-stealing mechanism and then they react. To a hunk of metal and plastic.

Maybe its the permanence. This idea that when we're put into some format--either written, drawn or taken--we imagine it as becoming a part of our legacy. If pictures could only be captured for an hour or two, would we react the same way? Would we hide from the lens? Or would we engage it like 13 year old girls who live from photo to photo?

If it's legacy driven, I feel more inclined to just shoot away. Is there a reason we shouldn't be remembered for how we were in that honest, everyday moment and not for the few seconds posing for the stranger behind a lens?

Maybe being caught in a genuine moment is simply too damning.