In The Blink Of An Eye

FTLComm - Winnipeg - July 10, 1999

We had been driving down Sergeant Westbound several minutes when we began to notice clumps of people on every street corner. Men, women, children, apparently not doing anything but standing around. My passenger figured out what was going on before me, as she pointed out that these people were waited for a bus. I had rejected this suggestion because it was not normal in some cities to see the bus stop that close to an intersection. However, I was wrong and indeed block after block, people were waiting and it is obvious that in this part of Winnipeg, public transportation is very heavily relied upon. I decided that these gatherings would make a good picture as it would tell about the lives of the people in this neighbourhood. So a red light gave me the opportunity to get my picture. I was focusing on the group of bus riders and another idle individual on the other side of the street, but when I unloaded the picture, to my surprise, was an individual on a bicycle, whom neither I nor my passenger had seen. Because he was not the subject, or because I closed my eye to check the view finder, this man had passed before us un-noticed. This set me to thinking, how much is passing us by, when we are looking for something else. While thinking we are perceiving the world around us, how much do we miss entirely and by so missing, these elements do not become part of the whole picture and we may come to inaccurate conclusions simply because important information was missed. In this picture, the reliance on public transportation was the issue, yet jumping into the picture is an individual who is making his way under his own power, clearly in control of his situation. He is even able to fix his gaze on me taking his picture, even though I never saw him at the time.