Don

Today, on my way to the Blue Line, I see a guy who’s taking a picture of the nearby water tower. I stop to ask him what he’s shooting, and we start talking. I notice that he’s got exactly the same camera as me, and I pull my Olympus out. We both laugh and do a bit of show and tell.

It was really cool to run into someone else who, like me, just took random pictures of the neighborhood… for fun, for practice, for no good reason. He told me about a house he always passes, somewhere in Bucktown, where an old man is sitting on the porch, hunched over his cane. Behind him, inside the house, a woman is sitting in a similar chair, with the door propped open, her looking out past her husband.

Don talked about wanting to take people’s photos without their knowledge – not out of a voyeuristic desire, but because the image would be more "honest." We chatted a bit about different approaches to shooting people, with and without permission. We ended up taking a picture of each other, with our respective cameras.

In retrospect, I’m a bit surprised at how suddenly I talked to him, out of the blue. Not like me at all. And now that I think about it, I’ve said that phrase ("not like me at all") a fair amount, in the past few months. Here’s hoping I keep that kind of thing up.