Ever since I landed in the United States in mid-September with my wife and little bambino, I have struggled to find my beloved street life shots. I think it is an American culture thing.
American lives are so isolated. We grab our coffee for breakfast, get in the car to go to work, sit at a desk all day, and return to our car to go home, and watch our favorite TV series before going to bed. How many minutes of fresh air do we actually take in a day? Really, we ought to think about that: how many non air conditioned minutes of air do we breathe on average?
For someone who enjoys photographing people, the American lifestyle sure makes that hard. I am always in my car moving from one place to the next just like everybody else, because even riding a bike, much less walking, in Texas is more like a commitment to professional sports than just simplifying life! I have to grasp those few moments in a day when both I and the next guy are both using up our non air conditioned time to take my shots.
About the only way I think I could catch any outdoor photos around here is to hang out in parking lots. Really, street photography of people is pretty difficult in modern America (unless you live in New York City or something. Maybe I should dabble in parking lot photography?
Even that, though, would be a serious affront to the protected individual isolation which many Americans have worked long and hard to preserve. English? I could get some pretty nasty looks. “I’ve got my rights!”, I can just hear them thinking. Oh, what to do?
