The Photographer's Code

You decide to visit your local park. You have become a close confidant to the homeless people who gather there most days. While talking to Cleo and Reed, you notice a new face in the crowd. It belongs to a stick-thin, middle-aged woman. She has her hand on her forehead as if taking her temperature.

Even from your vantage point, you swear she is trembling. She walks toward an empty table. Your feet, disassociated, move to her. Your camera is ready. You act like a crab before saying hello. She motions for your hesitant ass to sit down without any conditions.

Somehow, she agrees to answer your questions about her homelessness. Your heart and neural networks race while she speaks. Your heart and neural networks need to be captured, as do her humility and frailty.

Her story must be told.

So, when she seems done sharing for a moment or two, you ask if you can photograph her war-torn, sunbaked face, which you honestly say to her is “beautiful” and “wise.” She loses eye contact with you and turns her head to the right. Then, shyly giggling, then stops, returns to you, and smiles. You give her no direction and shoot five times.

You respect her enough to stop there.

You are not doing a model shoot because you realize you are taking something away from her. So, you respectfully ask if you can show her photo to others as long as you contribute it to her. She nods, and your heart sinks because she trusts you so readily and asks no questions. You reach for the twenty-dollar bill in your pocket and hand it to her, promising to return to the park again to see her.

When you return home and edit, the connections between heart and mother, wisdom and giving, soul and seeing bring you closer to the brief moment you shared. Why? You ask yourself. What is this energy rising in me?

You stand up quickly and walk toward the bathroom. Strangely, you think your hands are dirty. Scrubbing them, you stop to look in the mirror. You look different than usual, you think. The sentence, “I’m not homeless,” resonates and gleams for a while in your mind. Then it dawns on you: You could be her, and she could be you. What’s the difference?

After that, you decide: Every time you post or share her photo, you tell them her name but not her homelessness.

For you were both home once you knocked on her door.

Subject Two: The Still Life

You are bored at home and don’t want to leave the house. Then, you suddenly begin itching to take a photo. The idea of a still life enters your mind. You’ve always wanted to do it.

You remember some of the compositions of other stills you’ve seen. A landscape photographer, you’ve never taken one before. What appears in your mind as a “good” still life taps at your insecurities like it always has.

Suddenly, you find yourself walking down the stairs to the kitchen. You see your Samian ware bowl glistening in the light from the front-room window and put the apples inside. Then, you take a look at your wine rack. Sifting through, you find the 2015 Falernia wine you bought in Rome a few years ago and deem it perfect. Now for the hard part: background and light. You put your knowledge to the test, belabor, set it all up, and begin playing with arrangement. You do this for 20 minutes, and nothing seems right. You plow forward.

The wine bottle falls over. Cutting two apples in half, you slightly snip your left thumb. “You’re no good at this,” you tell yourself. You plow forward, changing light, changing camera settings, changing composition again. You shoot over and over and over again until you’re pleased enough.

The outcome wasn’t what you expected. You found it quite brilliant.

After you get in bed that night, a coagulation of ideas fights for your inattention, and it finally summarizes itself: The photo and everything in it gave you meaning, and you gave it back to them. Your perception of everything could only happen when the objects spoke to you and you talked to them.

This relational pull of all, the ontological lighting in it all, gives you peace, and then you can sleep.

Subject Three: The Unexpected Consequences Photo

You hear balls bounce and people chatting beyond the track field at a club you have never visited. There are so many trees blocking your view. However, realizing it’s a tennis court doesn't take long. What interests you are not people you can’t see fenced inside a fence covered with cloth tarps but a bird standing firmly on top of one of the fence’s verticle poles.

You attach the telephoto lens you brought to your digital camera, and looking through the lens, you can now tell it’s a Tufted Titmouse. It’s not the prettiest or rarest bird to you, but the clash between the gleaming silver of the pole against the bird’s gray breast is promising.

After you’re satisfied, you walk toward the street where you parked your car. You see a police car coming down the street, and you stop to let it pass. Instead, it pulls up to you. He gets out of the car and asks for your camera. You have no clue what’s going on.

You hand it to him. He asks you how to check the photos in the memory. You show him. He studies each one quickly and stops after about 60 seconds.

“Were you aware there were kids around the area where you were taking pictures?”

Of course, you had no idea. You hand him your business card, he gives you a warning, and you get into your car.

In the silence, a thrill rushes through your mind and body—electricity. You want to get home and process the photos of the bird. Then, out of somewhere, you have an associative thought of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” and you — like the silly person you are — wonder if there’s any connection. Was the bird telling you something? Did it watch over the whole ordeal?

Of course it did, you decide as you pull out onto the street. You tell yourself you aren’t naive enough to think it was an omen. Then you admit to yourself that you are shaken up quite a bit. You were wrong somehow and a little ashamed.

And the static comes to a screeching stop, and it dawns on you as you’re driving: The bird was telling you to be more watchful, even though you live in your head most of the time.

Alas, you never want it to happen again.