Pictures of Strangers

28 April 2010 - Filed under Words

Sometimes when I see a picture of a stranger, I get a small lump in my throat.

It doesn’t matter who it is or where it was taken, something about photos of smiling unknown people are so moving. Not in the same sense as National Geographic or Time Magazine, with their exotic locations and awe-inspiring, you-had-to-be-there events. Its the pictures of Joe Nobody on the street that matter to me.

Not the candid fleeting images taken on a secret whim, but the staged, posed images that are so popular in street fashion blogging. It doesn’t really matter at that point what the person is wearing. What matters is in their eyes.

As they gaze into the camera, chin half-cocked and smiling wide and deep, they are proud and indescribable happy to be simultaneously anonymous and famous. It doesn’t even matter if this image makes the front page of that blog, it only matters that someone was looking at them long enough to acknowledge them in a personal, respectful way that only humans can look at each other. And they can look back at us knowingly.

In a world saturated with too many images, such an image is a quiet reminder of what it means to really look at someone and see them as familiar and even human. Postmodernists argue that there is an inherent disconnect between a real person and their image, and this is true. But the image then becomes something greater than the person… something that reminds us of ourselves.

2010-04-28  »  admin