25 January

Something else happened and I can't show you the photo. I was riding the tube home when something happened and I photographed it but I can only tell you what happened, not show you.

I was standing in the carriage and there was a group of people standing opposite me and one of them was a Somali girl wearing a headscarf. (I am not inventing that she was Somali-- I am making that assertion based on what she said to the other people with her, they could have been friends or colleagues.) At Earl's Court, everyone with her got off the train and she was left on her own. She got out a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and started reading it. It was the Penguin Modern Classics edition with a big full-bleed portrait of Malcolm X speaking into a microphone and holding up his hand on the cover. And I surreptitiously snapped a photo. It wasn't amazing, but it was pretty good.

Then I felt sick with myself and deleted it. I turned around at Hammersmith and took this photo of the empty carriage out the window.

Something came up at the Restless Cities talk I went to last week where a photographer said he imagined himself as just a vessel to show others the world. It bothered me as soon as he said it and it has stuck in my craw for days. It reminded me of religious fanatics saying they were just carrying out God's will. It was arrogant and ignorant at the same time. He was claiming that somehow he could just be this pure vessel, just clean machinery, through which messages of humanity were passed on to the lucky recipients, untouched by emotion, circumstance, or prejudice. He was claiming that he could somehow eliminate himself and all of his history before he showed up, made a killer composition by divine intervention, snapped that shutter, and produced another nugget of truth.

I was acting that way when I took that girl's photo without even introducing myself. I was acting as though I didn't exist and I was just a magical portal through which the image would pass into being. I would take, carry, process and present that image all in ways that I am sure I would regard as detached and fair, while of course my own predispositions would be tarnishing it every step of the way. In the end, it would have my fingerprints all over it while I pretended or believed it was saying something about something else entirely. And so I would have made this girl collateral damage in my own pursuit.

So I deleted it. And I am happy I did but of course I have gotten all mixed up over it and decided to send it up into the great wide internet. None of this was helped, by the way, by the fact that I had read the Esquire article on The Falling Man earlier that day so everything seemed very serious by this point (link -- trigger warning: 9/11 and suicide). It is a good, long, serious read.