I was on my way home from work yesterday, sitting in traffic when I looked to my right and just above the car beside me I saw the upper torso of a photographer taking a picture.
He moved the camera this way and that, holding it sideways then turning the other way to view his "subject" from another angle.
His camera was one of those big cameras that you have to focus manually. It had a fairly large lens and looked kind of heavey. I was watching him and wondering what he was taking a picture of when the car beside me moved ahead "exposing" the whole photographer and his shopping cart full of all of his belongings.
He was a "cart pusher", "homeless", "street person" photographer!!! As my lane wasn't moving in the traffic I had time to rudely stare at my photographer making certain that indeed he wasn't pushing a cart full of expensive photography equipment. Fortunately he was so "focused" on his picture taking that he didn't notice my rude stares but those stares did ascertain that indeed he did have an assortment of empty pop bottles, shoes, garbage bags and tarps all neatly piled in his shopping cart.
Was he really taking a picture? Was there film in that camera? Why hadn't he pawned the expensive looking camera? Who knows?!! Who cares?!!
I was intrigued and let my imagination tell me that this man, standing on a busy street, in front of a fancy restaurant, being stared at by employed people in warm cars, saw something beautiful and wanted to capture it in his most valuable posession, his Minolta.
2 comments:
Perhaps it's payback? Advocates for the homeless call it a small but significant victory. "Most of these people haven't been homeless all their lives and they won't be homeless forever. So how kind is it to do journalism projects on them when they're at their worst?" said a man identified as Jim. "If a man lives in a cardboard box, that's his home. So how would like it if some 35-year-old divorcée taking a night class in photograhy, just the thing wandered into your living room and started snapping pictures of you, saying, 'it's for my assignment'? Maybe this guy you saw is reversing things?
But for the grace of god go I......if Tom were homeless he would still be taking photo's. And I'd have a bunch of pugs riding shotgun on my cart, which would be full of books.
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