Daydreamers

While looking at my photos I noticed I had a lot of shots with people with their eyes shut. Those photos had an eerie look to them. A lot of them were accidental, but not all. When you take pictures of people, especially crowds or groups, you will often catch that special fraction of a second when people blink. Normally, if you’re a a portrait/wedding/events photographer, you delete those frames, I, on the other hand, found those scenes interesting. If I have two similar frames, one of them with someone with their eyes opened and the other with their eyes closed, I often go for the latter, even in my portrait work. Those people look like they are caught daydreaming, lost in their thoughts, either alone or among the crowds. Once I realized I had more than a few of those intriguing scenes, I went back to my archives to look for more. ​Like most of my street work, this wasn’t planned at all. When it comes to street, I don’t go out and shoot with a project in mind, I’m more of a let’s-see-what-life-brings-today kind of photographer. All of those people are strangers and most of the pictures are accidental, I just happened to catch them with their eyes closed. To me, in the genre of street photography, it doesn’t matter whether photos are intentional or accidental as long as they are not staged. Most of the street photographers I know are very adamant about luck not having anything to do with their work. I am absolutely comfortable admitting that, with the exception of the shot of a guy in a suit sitting in Bryant Park – which by the way is the latest addition shot this month – all of those photos were lucky in-between shots. To me what matters is the end result – photos which give me that strange feeling of being able to enter those people’s minds. Now that the series was born, I might be able to pursue those daydreamers consciously across town.