A Different Take on Pictures

What Writers and Memories Have In Common with Canon 

(or any other camera, for that matter)

There's a stanza in one of my favourite poems ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), but not at all my favourite stanza, which reads:

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.

It always reminds me of a very characteristic old man I saw leaning out the window of a building above a very crowded Parisian street, watching, with ostensible amusement, all the pedestrians hurrying their way across the street in the narrow flow of the crosswalk freshet.

I like to think this tanned, leather-skinned man not only enjoyed all us pedestrians hastily going this or that way, but that this gentleman watched every day the hoards migrate.

I had wanted to take a picture of this old, smiling man, his big eyes wide and amused, his white undershirt wrinkled like his skin. But, between his noticing me glancing and me not desiring to upset the quick pace of foot traffic, I restrained.

When I went back to that crosswalk and peered, camera ready, at the window, he was gone.

It doesn't weigh me down, but I've never forgiven myself for not being "socially unacceptable" in raising my lens, in taking a photo a perfect stranger, in deviating from the status quo of respected privacy, in being different. Andy Warhol, the famous American pop artist, perhaps said it best: "You have to do stuff that average people don't understand, because those are the only good things."