Let me tell you this. img333, with story

White boy.

     What are you doing here?

          Are you lost?

               This is my neighborhood, you're poking your camera in.

I've heard many responses to my documentary intrusions.  Most times my smile is enough to have me accepted.  I do look mostly harmless.*

The farther away you are, to conceal your intentions, the more likely you are to get busted.  I get in close, having my subject aware of my presence, and they react, or sometimes just ignore me on purpose. There's no hiding from a few feet away, so I let it work for me. 

I was doing an inner city walk up Sycamore Hill in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, USA with my camera.  Still in my teens,  I found and photographed many interesting strangers first, sometimes friends later, as I wandered about.  I knew at the time, things were changing, and I needed to get them down on film, while I could.  Future generations would decide if it had value, and how well I did it.

This was a time of new freedoms, new methods to respond to the old standards helping or holding people back.  Your point of view was influenced by your age, your race, your gender, your education, your experiences and always your level of wealth, for money was a way to move in society, either easing the way, or blocking.  This was a period of social unrest, as all periods are. The Vietnam war was going on with draftees being selected from the poor and disadvantaged mainly, with a few volunteers following the governments position of stopping communism from spreading.  Now years later we are not only trading with the then enemy, we are actually sending them arms.

Taken with my Nikon F, with 50mm F2.0 Nikkor, on Kodak Plus-X 135mm panchromatic film, in 1969.  This was the previous exposure of image 334, posted earlier.  The two bring more of the story out, and benefit each other when viewed together.

 

Feel free to download, just give me photo credit.

eugene spiegel

In my gallery is a folder continuing the series of Sycamore Hill.

*Thanks to Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.