La Macchina Fotografica

“Mark!” my father always bellowed my name. “You could get run over by a car crossing the street. When your number is up, it’s up.” He was one of the few people I’ve ever known who could be a fatalist and optimist at the same time. In this case, despite his lecturing tone, he was mostly trying to be an optimist. That kind of talk, however, never made me feel very hopeful.

They say that your parents’ admonitions play in your head like a magnetic-tape loop. Over and over and over and over. “Do this, don’t do that. This is the way the world works, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t know if that’s true but I do know that I hear my father’s voice whenever I cross the road, especially a busy one.

In California drivers are supposed to stop when a pedestrian is in a crosswalk. Most do. But a few like to go as fast as they can and stop at the very last moment—a game of chicken with the pedestrian. Sometimes I see that happen and just stare. Could this mean that my number is up? So far, the driver has always stopped. But my father said…

Lately I’ve been photographing my experience in the crosswalk. I point the camera at the cars from waist level and click away in rapid-fire mode. I want to capture that moment of vulnerability as a two-ton body of steel confronts a 200-pound body of flesh. I figure it will someday result in a body of work. And if one day, my number really is up, my last photo ever will quite a shot.

Related posts:

1. Grabbing the Fog Daylight Saving Time plays tricks come October. The mornings are dark long beyond when my body clock says “Morning!”. My brain tells me to get up. My eyes say something different. I don’t like to move clocks forward and backward. It feels like I’m trying to cheat the cosmos or mold it into some kind [...]...
2. The Show on the Road “Let’s get the show on the road!” my father always said when he got impatient. I always imagined us as small circus ensemble as we’d rush to get into the car. It felt like he was ready to drive off without us if we didn’t hustle. Dad loved to drive. If it were a long [...]...
3. Flying Meetings—business meetings, that is—drive me crazy. Every one of them feels like slow death. I’ve never been to one that brings out the best in anyone, especially the best in me. I was a manager at 25, a vice president at 29, and a burnout at 40. Meetings, even today, at the age of 54, [...]...
4. “Stop Looking DOWN at Your Feet!” “I was a shy kid. More often than not I walked around enveloped in my own universe, surrounded by adults who seemed gravely serious. The world beneath me seemed much more interesting than those towering towers of adult babel. So I stared at the ground a lot. My father was always telling me to look up [...]...
5. Engaged Detachment I never feel more alive than when I’ve found a place and time to photograph. Something rings in my head, like the bell of a boxing match. I know that the light and time and place have all cooperated at that very moment to present me with a unique image, never to be repeated and [...]...
6. Moving Gasping for breath on steep inclines, I tend to chatter to myself on the trail—especially when the trek gets tough. Maybe it’s the endorphins, the energy drink, an over-baked brain, or simply oxygen deprivation. Anyone who listens gets an earful. “I’ve decided,” I say between gulps of rarified desert air, “that the key to a [...]...