No one can accuse me of loving humanity. I have been accused of being misanthropic in my outlook. Something my wife does not look kindly on especially as my dear son becomes more like me day by day (Yay!). But I must admit there are moments (more than I like to admit) of being touched by someone’s humanity. In fact this very lunch hour I seemed to have been more open to this phenomenon.
I set out with my Nikon D810 to work on my Refracted Landscape series (more on that in a later post). As I am looking through my viewfinder, someone gently whispers to me, Hey do you have a dime?” “Ugh”, my soul moans. But today, maybe because I had too much loose change jingle jangling in my pocket, I reach in my pocket and say, “I don’t have a dime but I have this.” I proceed to spill into his hands about $2 in change. “Thanks Man”, he says.
I go back to composing my image in the car window (I said I’d tell you about this series later, stay with the story) when I hear, “I have a flower.” I ignore his statement but he persists, “I have a flower”. I turn around, “Look I have a flower in my ear”. “I found it and put it in my ear”, he explains as a slight smile alights his face. It hits me all of a sudden. “You want me to take your picture”. “Yeah”, he says. I do, making several exposures and giving him a few simple instructions. “Thank You” I say and I reach out and shake his hand. All he wanted was a little attention and to my surprise I was happy to oblige. Hmm, don’t tell my wife.
For the rest of the lunch hour as I walked around I couldn’t help but be attuned to the people on the street. I took dozens of shots netting maybe 4 or 5 potentially useable images. There were two I thought I would post here along with this post since I have been planning on making my next Journal a documentation of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. The parade is on June 11 so it will be a couple of weeks before you guys see anything new along those lines. These 2 images seemed to be an interesting sort of preview as well as summing up my feelings about relations between the US and Puerto Rico.
Force Of Seeing 