Bridge

Here's a new picture. Over the past year and a half, I've been going back and forth between working on this series (Selected People) and a series of abstractions (Artist's Statements). It's unusual for me to do two series at once, but who says I can't? I guess I'm excited to be showing Selected People at the Houston Center for Photography in September, so it makes me want to extend the series.

This picture almost makes me blush. It depicts what I don't like about taking pictures: being conspicuous. I took about 200 pictures to make this composite, and these were most of the people who noticed me. It was a busy summer afternoon, and the tourists were streaming across the miniature bridge in the Boston Public Garden. I must have photographed well over a thousand people. But pretty much only these people's eyes flicked across me and my little camera, which was perched on the stone railing of the bridge. There is no way to know if they were annoyed, as they appear to be. And they are not really staring at me, since I am standing and the camera's lens, which they are looking slightly down at, is at waist level. They may have been frowning at their companions or at the perfect summer day, for all I know. But they certainly capture something about photography.