Waiting

I don't know what any of these three men were waiting for.

A customer, perhaps. A friend. The end of the day. It doesn't really matter because, after a while, waiting starts to look the same regardless of the reason.

What caught my attention wasn't the symmetry, although that certainly helped. It was how each of them had found a different way of filling the same empty time. One escaped into his phone. One sat watching the world go by. The other seemed somewhere between the two, neither particularly occupied nor particularly interested.

We don't talk much about waiting because it feels unimportant. We spend so much of our lives trying to get somewhere that the gaps between places barely register. Yet if you watch people for long enough, that's often when they reveal the most about themselves.

Some people need constant distraction. Others seem perfectly content doing nothing at all. Most of us probably drift between the two depending on the day.

Street photography has taught me that the moments we think are insignificant are often the ones that feel most familiar later. Not celebrations. Not disasters. Just ordinary afternoons where nothing much happened except people quietly getting on with being themselves.

Perhaps that's why I stopped to make this photograph.

Nothing is happening.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what's happening.