I first came across this neologism a week ago, on my return from New Orleans. I was talking to a woman from “the Bay Area”, and she turned me on to this Airbnb-type “corporate apartment rental agency” called Sonder. When I shared it with my friend, he texted back a definition: “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it” (Wiktionary).

Hold, please, this will tie together. I watch photography videos on YouTube. A lot. Lately, I’ve been excited to find a channel called Wrong Side of the Lens.* Today, I watched an episode with Richard Sandler. Now, Richard shoots unabashedly, with flash sometimes, and he shoots anyone: children, physically challenged, homeless, mentally disturbed, homicides, anything, anything he sees on the streets of NYC. And he spends a lot of time on the streets, photographing people. People. He photographs people that I dare not photograph, and I dare not photograph them because I have a moral fear of exploiting them. And I struggle with that a lot. I pass up many, many opportunities because of it, I ride my bike, and I press on it like a sore tooth, testing, testing, and then I miss the shot.

One reason is because of this concept, a concept for which there was no word before, just a description. I watch, closely watch, all of these people in this city, and I think: “They all have lives, complex, rich, sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful, lives”. And, full disclosure, I can know that in my brain, but I can’t feel it. I can have a sort-of intellectual empathy, but I don’t have real empathy. So I roll through the city with these thoughts tumbling in my mind with each snap of the shutter.

When my friend asked me why I wanted to take street photos, I explained that I wanted to capture the unguarded emotion, the unmediated expression, the spontaneous instant when a person unwittingly reveals something very intimate. They happen every moment, but no one captures them. That word! Capture. It’s so offensive and morally repugnant. The idea of capturing, catching, trapping an intimate, private human moment. But it’s what I want. Since my young manhood, I’ve played a game of snapping mental photos and thinking, “When I die, I want to examine this moment carefully”. If you ever have a conversation with me, you may well see me moving my head slightly to the left or right and winking my left eye. It’s because I’m lining up the shot. I want that moment.

We’ll come back to this. I’m still struggling with it. In the meantime, these two songs are related. Leonard Cohen needs no explanation, but you may want to read about him. Just Friends is composed of Nicolas Jaar, one of my favorite djs and composers and Sasha Spielberg, whom I did not know until I just did the search. And the history of this is that I didn’t know Leonard Cohen had anything to do with the Jaar version, until I did a little research after hearing the song in rotation.

That’s it, good night. I liked this post. . ..

*I can think of someone very specifically, who once said, with a straight face: “I don’t know which side of the lens I should be on”, to which I responded with uproarious laughter, because how could you not love someone who says that? Genius. Tell that boy I said Hi. I hope he’s Kickin’ Butt.

PS: The photo is an early-summer-morning shot of the Temple of Saturn in Centro. SPQR me.