One summer I began taking pictures
of people on the street surreptitiously, by
holding the camera at my waist and aiming
it at passersby when they were about six
feet away. It was important to avoid eye
contact and to keep walking as I pressed
the shutter. When the film was developed
I would find images that I could not
remember having taken.





What was most surprising was how
much the subjects of these photographs
seemed so intensely to inhabit their
gestures—something rarely seen in
photographs. In a gesture or a glance,
these people passing by and glimpsed
invisibly in a split second were present
as they never are when observed directly.


Later I recognized some of these
gestures as belonging to the movies:
great actors on screen achieve the same
thing by learning to inhabit themselves
just as these people do: naturally, that is.
They achieve a natural state in the most
artificial of media.