'Hurry Up and Wait' (The Waiting Part)

Moden Day Air Travel, with post 9/11 security requirements involves

special stresses and much 'hurrying up' just to spend interminable time

on exceedingly boring flights and, when at one's destination, waiting for

transportation by inceasingly crowded ground transportation to hotels,

car rentals, and/or parking lots. This is the wait before the final

segment -- ground transportation. Photo taken at San Jose International

Airport (Mineta). Your rating and critiques are invited and most

welcome. If you rate harshly or very critically, please submit a helpful

and constructive comment; please share your superior photographic

knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

A very good shot and story, John!

Thanks.

 

If you can believe this, I was walking along at not a fast clip, cameras around my neck, saw this scene just in front of me with my 17~55 lens set at its widest, quickly raised my camera and hardly even stutter-stepped (meaning I hesitated with my upper body while my legs continued walking), took this photo (and a second on 'C' drive), and continued my stride.

 

I might have liked to have framed it just a 'tad' better. I am sure you can identify just how, but once I'd taken the photo and walked past, reviewed my capture, it would have resulted in destroying the scene to be seen by even one subject here to return, cameras around neck to try to retake the scene, so here it is, one minor wart included.

 

I was very proud that while walking I could recognize a scene, raise camera so fast and while barely breaking stride take a postable photo (other photos I'm similarly proud of include 'Birds and the Belfry' a photo taken from a Paris taxicab riding alone near the Seine, showing a church steeple, clouds and some birds as well as the sun breaking through the clouds, all taken out the moving taxi window, plus one other taken also from a Parisian taxicab).

 

You are the one man posting on Photo.net I don't have to convince that carrying a camera everywhere is important and that good photos are all around us, if we just 'look' with some intelligence and discernment, as you have a far greater following than I (and deservedly so).

 

John (Crosley)

John, many thanks for your comment and compliment! Regards, Ruud.

in this photography you have captured three different "attitudes in waiting". This is what I think "street" photography (and maybe photography in general) should aim to: give to the observer a thoughtful synthesis of a story/concept that he could fill and complete with its own meanings. So thank you again, Giuseppe.

Hi John,

 

I like the way the photo illustrates your comment,thought I fear it may go over a few heads.

 

A great statement about modern travel and life. Maybe we could say going nowhere fast.

 

Peter

 

ps Don't bother with the points! Its not only my bio that comments on that!

Those who know me know that I don't flatter - I just make truthful statements, and if they happen to be flattering then so much the better. But there's never anything false about what I say about people or their work; the untruths or exaggerations would be too hard to remember, and I have no reason to 'gild the lilly'.

 

;~)

 

John (Crosley)

The 'Threes' Presentation that I have worked on and is in a state of incompletion pending new 'Presentation' software changes, should the Administration ever choose to make them, will benefit from the addition of this photo.

 

That Presentation is an accumulation of photos in which the number 'three' - often in subjects,but sometimes in other ways - contributes to the composition or some other attribute of my photos.

 

Here, it's in (1) subjects and (2) the attitudes (orientation) of subjects, as should be obvious.

 

John (Crosley)

I noted in the comment next above about the subject of 'threes' and each represents a different 'attitude' or 'orientation' and the 'orientation is important graphically or compositionally for the purposes of this photo together with the spacing of these individuals.

 

Anybody who has ever looked closely at Cartier-Bresson's photos, especially a certain subset of them, has probably noticed that individuals in various of those photos often are seen to be carefully spaced -- just so much space around them and no more and no less, and even in some the individuals are in pairs - and of couse they are not all precisely spaced - there is some appearance of randomness, as too much rigidity would give the photos an 'industrial' and preplanned look, and Cartier-Bresson's look (for all its studiousness) was about seemingly capturing life's 'casualness' (a la sauvette) ([stolen] on the fly).

 

It was his 'genius' (there's a proper use of the word 'genius' if ever there was one), that Cartier-Bresson could reach with his internal vision into the space of corporal beings and bring fom them the appearance of slight disorder from the order he seemed to see all around him, all occurring often within seconds -- images he grasped during their moment(s) of coherence just after and before their plunge again into the chaos of visual incoherence.

 

I try to do the same sometimes; this is one result one day and one moment.

 

That does not mean I copy the mercurial genius; merely that he created a wonderful paradigm; it was good enough for him, and I am not sure I can improve on it much, for this type of photo.

 

I take enough other types of photos he could never seek to try with his early Leicas - such as highly selective depth of field, and lots of other types of photos he simply could not have achieved because of technical deficiencies.

 

And, I have done better with color than he ever did.

 

He was involved in a campaign in the later part of his life to round up and destroy his color shots (it is written) because he felt they were deficient. (anecdote provided upon request, from a man whose photos he tried to destroy - a longtime friend, too, and publicly).

 

I am not a 'follower' or acolyte of Cartier-Bresson or a copyist, but if I were and could do his style on a continuous basis, it would be a high honor; however, I have several styles and this is just one of them. (I just finished editing a nude shot, from overhead in her bed shot at night from a 30-watt bulb 35 feet away, hand held.)

 

I keep experimenting.

 

Thanks for your observations on 'street shooting, what it is all about, and how this photo fits into the category. I feel the same way, and did so from the first time I saw the digital display.

 

John (Crosley)

'Going Nowhere Fast' is an intelligent way to caption this, but it doesn't obviously relate to the photo until it's explained, as there are no planes, cars, etc., in the picture, so I refrained from that.

 

And if I worried about my photos, captions and/or stories going over people's heads, I would have stopped posting long ago, and there would never have been such extensive commentaries under all my photos with so many wonderful contributions of such intelligence from so many wonderful contibutors.

 

And, I hear tell they are well read by many; I get many comments and special mentkion of these comments by those who read them and many (including beginners) who say they learn a great deal by reading these comments (including the early ones going way back, which deal with the basics of how to take a photo, and the internal process of how one confronts a photographic situation, especially one involving individuals one has to stare at through a viewfinder of a camera that may not be seen as 'friendly' (or is feared that way).

 

As to ratings; they do mean something for popularity; no matter how ill-defined.

 

It's a tribute, I think, that I went from a ratings pariah in some ways to someone who gets pretty good ratings without ever having given much mroe than a flying you know what about them . . . except for reading them to determine populaity and/or popular taste. I still post what I will.

 

Member Skip Hunt posted wonderful, high-rating and extremely popular color photos, went away for a while and came back, posted a great photo of a desolate filling station and wondered angrily why his great photo got panned by raters.

 

I had no problem with that.

 

I know the difference between 'popular' and 'great' - generally.

 

I have also been tutored recently in the subject, and my horizons have been broadened somewhat.

 

But my style(s) Is (are) essentially the same, only a little more variegated (varied) and somewhat richer as my technique(s) develop.

 

Thanks for a literate and intelligent comment.

 

John (Crosley)

Hi John, for me it's most of all recognisable. The all too familiar "forced anonimity" that's also so extremely obvious in an elevator. Maybe it's a sign of modern city life, or just life nowadays. The seemingly unwillingness or inability to communicate in what should be a normal way. "Don't get into my circle, I want my distance" Maybe it's something we've lost. I don't want to get to psychological on this, but like I said that's what strikes me most.

I once live in New York City and learned to explain to myself what I then saw as pretty outrageous behavior and rudeness on behalf of New Yawkahs, as they then spoke (with accents varying by borough, and even different in Joisy, than on LonGisland). Accents are disappearing somewhat now, despite what one may see in the Sopranos final episodes -- that's Joisy, for a guy from the lower lands, like you).

 

If one is forced to have encounters with a few people every day, one can maintain a certain degree of politeness to all; and especially if the crazy, insane or the obviously demented are (were) locked up in 'insane asylums' as they were in the 1950s when I grew up.

 

But a funny thing happened.

 

Psychotropic drugs came along and those people either (1) stopped from harming and killing themselves and/or othes with such great frequency and (2) many of them were forced by the Courts to be allowed onto city streets and to be allowed to lead what lives they could live, and if most took their medicines, they could often lead rather 'normal' lives.

 

That left those whose medicines would not help them much or who didn't want to or could not take their medicines either because they didn't like their medicines, couldn't afford them, couldn't find them or just got confused one day and fell off them and went a little bit off their rockers and various variants of the above (this isn't meant to an exhaustive dissertation on the aforesaid)..

 

So, during and before the Nixon/Ford years and even before, this nation's mental hospitals were being emptied out, but there was no organized means left for providing these people with aftercare and lots of them fell through the system, many of them to end up as 'criminals' (some truly doing criminal activity) and others being caught up in the criminal justice system because no one else would handle them when they got out of control.

 

Now in small towns or medium size towns, having such people around was controllable and people often knew who was who, so a modicum of good neighborlness could be maintained towards almost all.

 

But pour these same people into the workings of an inner city, often because good neighbors didn't want such people around them (NIMBY for foreigners to the US language -- Not In My Backyard), so they were left where their welfare checks, hostels, and other care givers would accept them or the streets would allow them to sleep (or even crash in business/'industrial aeas -- even over city heating grates.)

 

Now combine that with a daytime population that commutes into a major city, but lives in bedrooms far away, and which doesn't want to come into contact with 'undesirables' (and they truly often are), then you have the makings of a social problem that became part of the core of major city life and part of the heart of incivility as we know it now in major US cities.

 

Now, throw into the mix that in a major city like NYC that millions of people crowd the streets and mass transit, forced into incredibly close contact with others so that if one person breathes on a subway, another person must exhale, and, I even remember a time when gropers abounded on the NYC subways which were so ccrowded women told me they could not identify who had groped them. That crowding persists.

 

Infuriating.

 

Being thrown up agains massses every day, no matter what your mood, having to fight masses in traffic jams, metros, subways, just to get to a job -- to step over bums in the process or be accosted was the heart of the indignitities that attacked New Yorkers, and crime at one time also was out of control.

 

Crime now is more under control all over America - it's lower than it has been in modern memory, not just in NYC and not just because of ex-major Giuliani.

 

I was shot while on a Penn-Central train to Washington D.C. during the Martin Luther King race riots - a black man shot a white man and with the same bullet hit me and almost caused me to lose my leg. They were fighting over a seat that the black man had left his gun on in a paper bag; he was taking the gun to D.C. to use in the riots there (he was a mental patient if you get my draft and also get where this is going).

 

Well, if you live in a small town it's one thing and incivilities were once met with by police who had unfettered control over the uncivil.

 

Nowadays civilians have ''rights' which are recognized in Court and, police no longer can 'play it by ear' because they almost always 'played it by ear' against black people and other minorities, often running them out of smaller towns (I know of several such incidents pesonally, including the police for the entire town of Winemucca, Nevada which went on for decades before they ever got caught running blacks out of their town.

 

So the uncivil now are more free to be uncivil and to badmouth everyone without feeling the crushing blow of a rural or small town cop's nightstick; same for a larger city (mainly).

 

Civil rights and new 'rights' awareness have contributed to the 'we can do anything you didn't catch us redhanded with' and 'we can be rude if we want' attitude.

 

Well, that was the ages-old attitude of New Yorkers anyway -- the way disparate populations dealt with other foreigners -- just keep with you own kind and be rude to the rest.

 

In time the melting pot did work, but it took a generation or two. That's all.

 

Now NYC is a more wealthy enclave and crime has decreased all over the USA. That city no longer has those factory/service jobs that attracted the immigrants, and those it does often are from places like Mexico where the citizenry had better well be well behaved or they'll be deported (which is one good reason why America does not 'legalize' them - to keep them all well-behaved and under control.)

 

And no matter what, if you had a face-to-face encounter with 300 to 3,000 people every day, you'd start to wear a mask too, as you went to work or about you everyday business.

 

And that's how this photo relates to your comment: the mask.

 

These guys have been captive in a giant tube of aluminum (or composite) for an hour to 20 hours or more, often sitting next to people they had no wish to sit next to, having to endue all sorts of indiginities and humiliations from TSA screenings and questionings (I'm not arguing it's not necessary- just it's humiliating nevertheless and dehumanizing), to the indignity of being reduced to a piece of paper/cardboad known as a boarding pass together with identification which signifies your status to claim that little crappy seat your rear end was glued into next to the woman wearing that smothering perfume and that guy whose elbow kept jabbing into your sensitive gall bladder.

 

So, when you get to the othe end, you want to reclaim your freedom a little.

 

That's what this photo is about.

 

Reclaiming one's freeedom, amid life's daily insults.

 

It takes a little space to do that,

 

(thanks for giving me a chance to think it through so I could explain it.)

 

John (Crosley)

 

(I could write a better essay if I weren't writing at 60 words per minute, stream of consciousness.)

 

jc

 

© 2008, all rights reserved

It is said that curves are more engaging to the eyes than straight lines. Your composition here is quite effective because I see some sort of curving perspective starting with the head of the guy on the far right hand and ending with the guy talking on the phone. It then travels back through a flowing movement that starts with the arm on the right side touching the foot then moving up to the arm holding the phone. This produces a sharp contrast with the straight lines from the bench and the windows above. A classic for the 3's collection.

I see it a little differently, but not with noticeably different results.

 

I focus on the line from the tops of the heads and notice that they form a horizontal line not unlike a reverse 'J' form, which contrasts somewhat with the very straight lines which seem to predominate in the theme and this contrasts the line of the men more with the lines of the architectecture, but at the same time does not directly contradict it.

 

In other words, they're just about 'going with the flow' of lines, but they have their own and independent way of going, and the end man's head, which is raised, is sort of a coda to the entire enterprise, which signifies it's at an end (or of course, suitably, can repeat).

 

But that's just my offbeat way of looking at my own photograph, taken on a moment's notice and does not denigrate in the least from yours either.

 

I was pleased when I examined the final work to find the cut of the sidewalk expansion joints, right, just touched the right margin, without having to be 'forced' with a crop line.

 

But I confess, this photo was cropped, slightly, left to eliminate a conflicting trash barrel -- but ever so much. It might have been just as strong (maybe stronger) if I'd cloned out the concrete barrel, but I don't do such things. I can't get a reputation for such, or my honesty in presenting my images as being 'representational' would suffer, and I have no advertising client to please, who might not pay me (no one pays me, how about that?)

 

Some day, though if I make it with gallery sales, though - although this would be 'marginal' . . . . despite pretty high scores.

 

I'd want a 'transporation context' more apparent -- or something more contextual in view, I think. As it stands, this is a pure play in 'waiting' without any context at all, visually. They could be waiting for tea or tee time (except for the shoes - and tagged bag - of course).

 

My best wishes to you. You have proved to be one thorough and dedicated student of my work with a pretty da*n good record of 'reading' my work correctly, and even when my admittedly cursory analysis does not directly comport with yours, I leave open the possibility your analysis might be better than mine (as here).

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

An outstanding comment and photo on the way we travel! Exceptional work John!

The photo was the 'original comment' and then came the caption and the 'request for critique' also which were 'comments'.

 

Finally, there was the huge 'essay' which was in the form of a written 'comment', and I'm wondering which of those you were referring to when you were making your own 'comment' about mine.

 

Of course the photo just doesn't quite stand by itself as a 'comment' without more. Otherwise it would be in my folder of the best of my best -- a couple of suitcase-like objects just doesn't qualify it as being about 'transportation', without airline signs or airliners in the background, so I had to polish my writing skills a little.

 

And, believe it or not, I took the photo, and wrote the essay to 'sell' and 'explain' the photo but without notes, and completely extemporaneously, as this whole thing is entirely clear to me -- it didn't require a rocket scientist to figure this one out, except it is not clear to the viewer (as it was to me) that these guys are waiting for end-of-the-line ground transportation.

 

Anyway, Doug, I'm glad you enjoyed this presentation, and I'm still interested in what parts were most interesting to you (did the photo stand alone, or did it need the help I gave it?)

 

Of course, as a composition, I think the photo stands alone, but I mean did it need help to relate it to 'transportation', I mean?

 

Best to you and thanks. (comment edited 2/19/08)

 

John (Crosley)