Photographing Strangers

I photograph a lot of music events and Renaissance festivals, I take a lot of photos of people they see me for a moment as I ask for their photo get the shot and then on they move with their lives.

For me I get the shot, edit it, review it, promote it, view it again and again hundreds of times, maybe I enter it into a competition printing it on a large stretched canvas, I have a few hung in my tiny apartment. Peoples faces that I see everyday, I become so familiar with every line ever color, looking at them with the focus and intensity that you can only get as an artist perfecting  your art.

Then a year or two later we are both at the same event again, they normally don’t remember me I being such a small moment in their life, but I see them and I remember them, the way that light and color played on their skin, the way they smiled, how they looked and felt in the ephemeral moment that I took that photo. It’s like being in love with someone who has forgotten you.

It’s one of the stranger magics of photographing strangers.