Truth

One of my favorite quotes on photography comes from the astounding Sean Tucker: “Get small and tell the truth.”

It means doing all you can to be unnoticed, to not bruise the scene in front of you by having a look-at-me camera or an intimidating presence.

And it means telling the truth about the world.

Photography makes that trickier than writing - with writing, we all know that the narrator might be unreliable. In a lot of cases, it's why we enjoy the writing in the first place! But with photography, there's this implication that what you're seeing really did happen, in just the way the photographer showed you. But the reality is slippery. The photographer chooses the framing, what's in and what's out. They light to direct your eye in a particular direction, moving across the image. They construct a story for you, turn what is always in media res into something you feel like you understand.

I say all of this to give some context on an image that's stuck with me, taken about a month ago, here in Paris.

The story behind it is longer. One of my all-time favorite poems is Pont des Arts, by Rebecca Wee (fun fact, I actually own the exact broadside I linked to there.) It's always hit me right in the heart, and captures something about the beauty and the sadness that threads through Paris.

On the day I took this, I was wandering home after a photo walk when I saw a woman climb down onto her knees, prostrate herself, put out a small paper cup, and fold her head into her arms.

No one reacted.

I heard Rebecca Wee's words in that moment, felt that poem hit, and knew I had to try my best to capture it. I shot for maybe 10 minutes, watching the crowd pulse past. Tourists and workers. Joggers and bikes. Buses and garbage trucks rasped at the curb, accelerating past us. Music curled by from party bikes, doppler-shifting past.

And the crowd - the crowd just broke around her. No one stopped. No one left anything in the cup.

I shot as long as it felt ok, then walked over, wished her luck, and gave her all the cash I had on me. Then I went home to review the photos.

Out of the hundreds of images, there is only one where someone is looking in her direction. People approached, averted, and then resumed. As I sifted through, I had a few images that I felt really captured that willful ignorance, the stinging loneliness of the moment.

But among them all, the one that stuck with me, weeks and weeks later, is that first image with the jogger above.

It's the brutality of the footstrike, inches from someone's head. The wide space around that says this was a choice. The contrast between someone running for pleasure in fancy gear with knees and elbows pressed into concrete. The terrible knowledge, passing between.

And I hope, that somehow, it captures the truth of that moment. Of who we are as people - our beauty and our brutality.

I'm curious too, what you think of it. And whether, in the whole story, you think it tells the truth. Always feel free to write back - it still goes straight to me, and I read every reply (and write back to as many as I can!) :)

With lots of love,

-Steven

p.s. The best thing I saw all week was a re-watch of this heart-pulling music video by Calle 13 - Latinoamérica. ❤️