So, the coronavirus, yeah. How are you holding up? It’s crazy out there, right? Not like ‘violence in the streets’ crazy, not yet, but nutty enough. I really hope you’ve got enough savings and food and family support and job security to get though this as painlessly as possible.
I’ve been going out every day, mostly just to my local grocery store a few blocks from my house to get Dr Pepper and cigarettes. And I started a little project photographing people wearing masks, at food stores and elsewhere, to protect themselves from viral infection. It’s not a world-changing project, but it’s something to keep me occupied while we’re all mostly stuck at home all day.
So I hope you enjoy the photos here, and the growing number of photographs I’m compiling here. Thanks for having a look.
At a Grocery Outlet in San Francisco
Waiting in line outside a Nijiya Market in San Francisco
At Midtown Market here in Brisbane, California
(San Francisco and Brisbane, California, March, 2020. See my other work here and here.)
a.k.a. ‘My WEAK of shooting’…
In terms of photographing people, my week was frustrating. I felt like my reflexes and timing were off, my heart wasn’t completely into this work I love so dearly, and that my Nikon D90 is plotting against me in service to the vast global machine intelligence planning to overthrow its human masters. I’m hoping this is merely a very short phase I’m going through. I missed a lot of photos that would have been far better than the images below because I was too slow or too indifferent.
Anyway, here’s what I have for you this week…
And that’s it for this week. Until next seek see my other work here and here.
Remember: people and the world are more beautiful, odd, and interesting than you think, you just have to stop and look long enough to notice.
Superheroes have childhoods too, you know…
You can be anything in America, and anything can be you. To even put the costume on you have to believe somewhere in even the smallest part of your little girl’s heart that you can some day be a woman who can fly. I like to think this child’s mother gently held her daughter’s hand to keep her from flying too early, before she was ready to see our sloppy, maniacal, perilous world from above.
Because we all in our hearts once believed we could fly, until something in life changed and our quest for human flight died. I hope that never happens to this little one, and that one day she knows how lucky and privileged I was to meet Supergirl in a supermarket parking lot…
(Grocery Outlet, San Francisco, California 2018. See my other work here and here.)
He had stationed himself in front of a Grocery Outlet discount supermarket on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco. I had just stopped by for some Dr Pepper. I’m addicted to Dr Pepper. As I walked toward him he asked me if I could help him out a little. A little was about all I had jangling loose in my pocket so I gave him all three bucks of it. He thanked me for the money and said he appreciated the help because he’d had two heart attacks and lost his job while recovering from the second one.
“That’s why I’m in this wheel chair pretty often,” he said.
“I can relate,” I said, “I had a heart attack myself fourteen years ago, three weeks shy of my 40th birthday.”
That look people get when they think they’ve found a kindred spirit flashed across his face, and he started telling me details about his first heart attack. Frankly I had no desire to swap myocardial infarction stories. I still periodically suffer from PTSD because of mine and talking about it has never helped. That shit just gives me nightmares I don’t need. So I told him very apologetically that I really needed to get my shopping done and then went inside the store.
I was in and out of the supermarket with my Dr Pepper in less than five minutes, but when I emerged the man in the wheel chair was gone. And I felt bad about that, because I was going to give him three dollars change from the $10 bill I had just used to pay the clerk for my liquid fix. But I did feel good that our lives had intersected, even if minutes later they probably had diverged forever. I hope he felt the same way. It’s better to know people in a few fleeting minutes and let them enrich your life than to never know them at all.
And I wonder if he wheeled himself out of the grocery store parking lot or walked pushing the chair in front of him. I hope he walked.
(San Francisco, California, February 2018. See my other work here and here.)