Walk On By...

(When I look at this image, I hear this song: J Dilla - Walkinonit, maybe you should listen to it too)

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a photojournalist (well, first I wanted to a paleontologist, but after that phase passed). I love most photographic art, and although I'm always blown away by Ansel Adams' landscapes, or Mary Ellen Mark's portraits, the feeling I get when I look at those types of photos doesn't compare to the feeling I get when I look at photos that aren't posed and/or manipulated. I love the idea of the photographer seeing something that they find so important that they have to share it with someone. I also love how pictures like this freeze time, and transport the viewer back to whenever it was taken. As you could probably guess from the photo, and my introduction, the tradition that this photo draws from is the tradition of documentary photography, and photojournalism.


At first I wasn't sure what image I wanted to submit for this. I knew that I wanted to submit something in the vein of documentary photography, or photojournalism, but I didn't know what. I spend a lot of time on The Big Picture Blog, and browsing photo archives, and when I went to The Newseum in DC, I spent an hour poring over the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos. I even have a folder full of photos that I've collected that I think are amazing, but there just wasn't one that was calling out to me. Then, as I was wasting time last week, avoiding my XML-coding assignment, I happened across this image and knew that it was the one for this blog.

At first glance, there's not much to the photo. It's just a couple walking down the street, holding hands, listening to some music, and then there's some people in the background. But then, as you scan the background, you see this guy, who's sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette, and he is absolutely disgusted. As you look past that guy (that asshole, as I like to call him), you see that everyone else is just doing their own thing; here's a mother (or maybe babysitter/sister), and a child playing in the park, a guy going home after doing some shopping, another couple chatting, and there's another guy in the back right who's also looking at the couple, but he doesn't seem to be affected either way. Then you go back to that asshole, just glaring at this couple. Then you go back to the couple in the foreground, and you notice their faces: the guy is strolling on, looking ahead, not happy, but not sad; and the girl is moving forward, but she's looking down, and she appears to be kind of sad. There's just so much going on in such a simple photo.

Another thing I like about this photo, is that, although there are still some people who feel the same way that this guy feels about interracial couples, they are a minority. But this photo can also be compared to the feelings that some people have towards gay people. I'm sure there's a photo somewhere on the internet that is the same, except there are two men, or two women holding hands.

In my mind, this image raises a lot of questions, like:

• Who are the people in the foreground? 
• What is their story?
• Is the girl looking down because she's sad, or for some other reason?
• Is the man in the background really an asshole? Or does he just have bad indigestion, or something?
• Where are they?
• When is this?
• What 8track are they listening to? 
• Is the man just annoyed by the tape, and not the couple?

The more I look, the more questions I come up with.