21 Months Wandering

For twenty-one months, between two professional lives, I had nowhere I had to be. I wandered Paris with no other program than looking — streets, trams, métro lines, the places where strangers sit close enough to touch and never look at each other. I photographed with my phone, at arm's length, inside the crowd. Faces absorbed in themselves, closed eyes, a man holding a sleeping baby against his cap, bodies cut by hard light. No events, no landmarks, no anecdote. Only looks, postures, emotions — what Lorca called the Duende, the dark surge that cannot be explained, only recognized. Some people are butterfly catchers, others gold diggers; I am on the tracks of the Duende.