there are people in these photographs

 

the presence of human figures in my photos is unusual. when the image shows figures in space, they tend to be obscure, literal dark shadows, or too distant to read as characters in the dramatic sense, though perhaps they read as characters in the sense of a written language. 

up above, a very old picture taken during prep for a red rover event i was in. laaura goldstein & my husband rupert are discussing something, while rupert adjusts (dances with? tickles? poses with?) that annoying lamp whose plastic shades used to always slip & melt against the bulbs. maybe that's the matter being discussed. 

the "bill & sons" garage picture has a more implied population, in the way that signage always will, & vehicles. a city street sign. the dense piled-up appearance of the shallow depth of field makes the urban environment saturated with itself. who put all this stuff here? who uses it & in what ways?

in the third photo, the dog was the occasion, which is probably obvious. everything goes on around the dog, & its human driver is obscured by the vehicle around them both. all the pedestrians & bus patrons circle the dog, who won't see them until they are behind it, like me with my camera.

in the final image, the arrangement of dark figures on the stairway & balcony of the modern wing of the art institute suggests musical notation as i look at it now. i don't remember if that's how i saw it when i took the photo. i remember the occasion of the photo, but not what made me shoot it. i think it had more to do with the strong horizontals & diagonals against the verticals. the human figures were there, but also moving--i don't think i would have seen the future "oh, music!" moment at that time. this was a point-&-shoot moment, not a well-thought-out composition.