Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the unpaved streets were filled with men and women such as the lady above trying to sell the remains of whatever seemingly random pieces of salvageable products (relatively speaking) that they could find. It is the sadness in this woman’s face, and so many others, that tells me those wooden boxes and empty paint buckets have been sitting there for awhile and aren’t going to be sold any time soon. After all, in a city where the only police I saw were in front of and inside the supermarkets, I don’t believe a broken pot is on the top of these people’s list of things to buy when there is no food to put in the pot in the first place.
Although commonplace, (a man collecting scraps through piles of garbage), as soon as I saw this man in particular I insisted we stop the vehicle so I could try to get a sense of him. I don’t know what precisely compelled me to do this; was it a conversation I was looking for? Was it a high-five? Was it an empty bottle of Mountain Dew? What I realized eventually was that this figure, and I say the word figure for a reason, drew me in because what I was looking for was his face. Physically speaking he was alive, but in an eerie way, he was almost an identifiable enigma. No matter how hard I looked, how many photos were snapped, I could never find this man’s face. This moment symbolized a lot for me. Not only had he lost his obvious belongings, but he had lost the very thing that enables us to belong; his face.
With such chaos, corruption, and uncertainty, it’s easy to understand why you’d not only want to flick off someone taking your photo, but deeper than that, why you’d want to flick off the world.
