Looking Elsewhere

I took these photographs years apart. Different places. Different people. Different days.

Yet when I was going through old images recently, they seemed to belong together.

The first shows two men standing only a few feet apart, both looking in completely different directions. I don’t know whether they knew each other. They might have been together. They might not. What interested me was how disconnected they felt despite sharing the same bit of pavement.

The second photograph shows a young lad leaning against a shop window, half accompanied by his own reflection. He looks as though he’s waiting for someone, although that’s probably me inventing a story that was never there.

Photographers do that. We spend years trying to be objective and then immediately start making things up. What drew me to both images wasn’t what was happening, but what wasn’t.

Nobody is doing anything particularly interesting. Nobody is performing. Nobody is aware of the camera.

They’re simply somewhere else for a moment.

The older man appears to be watching one thing. The younger man another. The boy outside the shop is physically standing still but looks completely absorbed by whatever has caught his attention inside the shop.

Most people spend their lives like this. Standing in one place while thinking about another. Waiting for something. Remembering something. Looking for something.

Even when there’s nothing to find.

Street photography often gets described as documenting life, but I think a lot of it is documenting distraction. The small moments where people quietly disappear into their own heads without realising anybody is watching.

Which is probably why these photographs ended up sitting in the same folder.

Different people.

Same habit.

Always looking elsewhere.