Surveillance

Untitled (black and white photograph)
Untitled (black and white photograph) by Paul Politis
Untitled (black and white photograph)
Untitled (black and white photograph) by Paul Politis

 

I didn’t even see the guy in the far left corner watching me until I looked at the photo later on my computer. I and my camera were focused on the gentleman bottom center (who was wondering why I was photographing in his direction). The surprises, the synchronicities, the chance juxtapositions that are often captured by freezing a fraction of a second of time with a camera in an often frenetic world is for me a large part of the attraction of doing this type of photography, “street photography”. The world often offers surprises and delights that I could never imagine beforehand, and that live and die in the blink of an eye.

There are lots of examples I can think of in my own work. One that readily comes to mind is the photo below from a few years ago, where the man’s shadow is not something that I predicted or anticipated — I was simply interested in the diagonal streams of shadow and sunlight on the wall behind the man and he walked past me.  Click. Without the man’s arm at that precise angle and placement, nestled perfectly in that small pocket of sunlight, there is no photo here. I needed something else and chance (or insert a better word there if you have one) provided it.

Untitled (black and white photograph)
Untitled (black and white photograph) by Paul Politis

Stuff like this helps to keep me going.