Beautiful Strangers

What a beautiful glimpse, a moment in their life that I got to capture and hold for myself. Looking at them then as I took the picture and now as I see it again, I feel lucky. I imagine who they are, why they chose this place and where they came from. I get to take their experience of surfing here at Long Beach, here at the edge of the New World where waves claim lives and nature is in it's most raw form and imagine their story as if I know who they are. I love doing this. I love to be the writer of who these characters might be. It's profoundly interesting to me.

Most people who see these stranger snapshots think it's weird that I do take these pictures but I think it's beautiful and I never throw them out. I've done it since I got my first camera as a kid, which drove my parents nuts to be exposing film of people they didn't know. They thought it was very wasteful and in guilt, I stopped doing it until I got a better camera and a job and started paying for my own film and developing. Film isn't the gold I was lead to believe that you have to pay, it's a tool to be played with. Now with digital, no one can criticize the cost cause it only costs if I develop them. But they still think me odd for it.

I'm not sure why but I have always taken pictures of strangers while living their lives and writing their own stories. One of the first I can remember taking was of a group of strangers,strangers even to themselves, sitting all over a grassy bank, with a rocky hill behind them waiting for a bus to come along. The weather was beautiful and even though these people were on their way to be busy somewhere else, at the moment I found them, they were having quiet solitude and physical relaxation right in the midst a very busy interesection. Quiet solitude when there was no solitude to be found. I still have that picture, I even placed it in a photo album. I wonder where that old album is.

The thing is, they have a story, their story is being written right along side of ours but most of the time we don't see their story because ours is right here, immediate, consuming and distracting. We don't often have time to see the beauty of all that is around us let alone have the chance to see the the beauty around someone else that we will never know. The chance to grab a guess of what it looks like through someone's someone elses unknown experiences of the place they are at this one moment. I find it so beautiful. Like a painting done by one of the Great Masters, something that I will never be able to recreate but I'd like to hold onto for myself.

These beautiful people. I know them for one moment, but it's my secret. They won't ever know.