Samaritans.

I don't know where to start. It could be long.

Obviously, what you are looking at is a man laying on the ground, as a person walks by.

I haven't introduced you guys yet to this series of photos I have been building. It's a series of photos that I've taken of people I walk behind as I am out shooting street. I don't know, it's sort of my form of souveneirs.

I saw this guy (the one walking.) He was walking across the street from me, then he made a hard left down a street just in front of me and I picked up the pace to get closer. Something to add to my walk behind series.

It's stuff like this that just unfolds before your eyes.

I noticed a man laying on the ground, and thought that it would be powerful enough to capture the scene as this man walks by.

I just realized now how presumptious it was of me to assume that he wouldn't do anything except walk by, but I imagine you couldn't expect much more of someone.

I stoped, and I watched. He wasn't breathing.

I made a phone call. Something along the lines of: Uhmm, yeah, uh, there's a dead guy on the sidewalk here, come pick him up.

I waited, I stood there, and took a photo of each person that walked by him without looking or seeming to give a shit.

At one point a lady walked by and started to bust out laughing, until she looked up and saw me taking her photo. She couldn't look at me, as she covered her face and passed.

I waited 15 minutes. I was hoping he'd spring to life and grab their ankles as they walked by, something like candid camera. It never happened.

It started to rain, so I made another call, this time saying: Please come quickly, there's a white man having a heart attack here.

I walked away with some kind of sense of clarity.

It's interesting, these kinds of things, I can never expect to know how to feel. It wasn't sad, to me, it wasn't disgusting, like some people might think when they see soemone dead. It was just, someone, on the sidewalk, who clearly died alone.

He doesn't have anything to worry about anymore.

The world chewed him up and spat him out.

I don't know how any of you will react to something like this. Quite frankly I don't care.

Im not putting Mature content on this. Anyone can turn on CNN or open a news paper, or fucking walk by this scene, and there's no need for mature content stickers. Let the administration put it on themselves, for all I care. I think reality is something you should not be able to escape.

And thank you for looking and reading.

"What motivated me?"

To take a photo of a scene, how I saw it to be. To present reality through my lense. The motivation of any young aspiring photojounrnalist; "to change the world".

Infos

Canon AE-1 ~ Canon 50mm 1.4 S.S.C. @ F/7 ~ 1/250 sec ~ Kodak 160NC three years expired

Why I chose 160NC? Because it was in my camera and I got it for cheap (free from craigslist) and I wasn't about to switch film while on the fly with a scene like this about to evaporate before my eyes.

Why I chose 1/250 @ F/7? well, with the AE-1, you select the shutter speed, and it selects the corresponding aperture for the correct exposure, so I selected 1/250 to slow the shutter a little (instead of 1/500 ot 1/1000) in order to get a smalled aperture, and a little bit more of a greater depth of field. You might be thinking F/7 is an odd aperture, for the sake of being completely acurate, that's what it was, because of the AE-1's auto aperture program nature.

Philadelphia, PA August 27, 2006

Photoshop: +10 contrast. That's all.

Many Thanks

I'd like to thank each and every one of you who took the time to look at this and read the description.

It is truely humbling to have a photo which I took and means so much to me...to have it reach out and touch, open eyes, wake up, sober, provoke thought in poeple.

Thank you for the comments. I will not respond to many. I feel that what needs to be said has already been said here in the description. I wiould like to let you know I read every single one though.