Every couple of weeks or so during a weekend I meet some friends, or better said, acquaintances, in a park for two or three hours. The children play, adults talk, I take photographs of the group. Later at home I upload the photos to my computer, and e-mail the best ones in batches of five. Two weeks ago I took 65 shots, yesterday, while thinking that I was taking fewer, I ended up pressing the shutter 85 times. Well, three pics were of shadows on a wall and not of these friends/acquaintances.
You're never in those pictures, I was told. Indeed, the photographer is never in the picture, and in the roughly 15,000 I have taken in recent years, I'm in only a handful. A ghost. I am a ghost in this house, as the minor hit song by a long forgotten country band Shenandoah said, a song that gained its well deserved reputation, when diva Alison Krauss loaned it her weight and with her band which includes the great Jerry Douglas recorded it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKXhIMgTsrE
And there, in the background of one of the photographs I snapped yesterday, is a young mother I noticed in the park, pushing her son, one year old, I estimate, on a baby swing. I was standing above our group's blanket with a baby and a mom on it, looking in the direction of that swing, and noticing the graceful movements of this mother 30 feet away from us. She must be a dancer, I thought, or had trained as a dancer. She was unself-conscious, unaffected, even after she apparently noticed (or not) my rude gaze. I didn't get a chance to speak to her, she was later joined by an older couple, her parents probably, and they soon walked away, while I tried to verify or discredit my above observation by watching other young mothers there. And in doing it I remembered what I had already known, that most of us move about gracelessly, as if we were carrying the weight of all our troubles and tragedies on our shoulders.
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