street life

There are lots of advantages to taking photos of inanimate objects. They don't move or get bored when you take picture after picture. You can get as close as you want and if you don't like the background or the light, you can circle round for a another angle or pick them up and put them somewhere else. People tend to be less cooperative.

Today, though, turned out to be a very good day for taking pictures of people. The streets were blocked to traffic and filled with people. There were people in costumes, people walking on stilts, people playing instruments, people wearing masks, people dancing, people standing and watching, and, everywhere, people taking pictures. I sat on the curb or worked my way around the edges of the crowds, seeing how many pictures I could take before the camera's battery ran out. I think I made it up to 207, though lots were just blurs or accidental shots of the sidewalk. There were some pictures that I really wish I'd managed to get: a musician in a white shirt surrounded by dancers waving purple feathers, a drummer who'd stuck an extra drumstick down the back of his pants, a woman in a sequined party hat, another woman carrying a flowering branch and a violin case. But the one I was sorriest to miss was a view of the whole street fair reflected in the brass horn of a tuba. What I saw there was a more cheerful version of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, one where no shadow of a judgment to come troubled the dream-figures' joys.