Fewer weird or interesting moments go unwitnessed at this point in a world full of cameras in phones. When I first started trying to get better with photography, that was not so much the case, and the phone cameras were also at that point not very good at all. I took my first DSLR everywhere for a period of years and every once in a while you’d just spot something and say “What is going on here”? and have a chance to take a shot of it.
For all I know, this scene is not unfamiliar to people living in Austin. I was in town for a conference and I was working at the Johnson Presidential Library and I suddenly spotted this woman walking along below my hotel. She was by herself, very assuredly going somewhere at a good clip. I don’t think there was a march or an event that she was planning to join. It wasn’t Halloween. I thought about going down to the street to ask what the meaning of her outfit was but by the time I got down there she was going to be many blocks away. So I was just left with an interesting image and an unanswered question.
Those kinds of images are a definite subtheme in my personal archive. Sometimes you really don’t want to take out a camera when you come across a mysterious scene. It might ruin the moment, destroy a fragile accident. Or it feels like a dangerous thing to do—I recently ran into a group of angry white male marchers not far from Borough Market in London who I kind of wanted to take a smartphone shot of but it felt like a bad idea whether they were just a bunch of lads with too many pints in them getting worked up about a football match or a bunch of white supremacists. But when you can get one, a photo feels like insurance against self-gaslighting, because you can often doubt later on that you saw what you thought you saw.
On a different subject, Sunday’s black bean soup turned out really well. I couldn’t post up about it because my smartphone camera was being really weird and I couldn’t get the photos off the camera for some reason for hours and hours afterwards.