ABOUT THE PHOTOS

    
  What was I taking pictures of?

Twenty years ago in the residential neighborhoods and around the public lakes of South Minneapolis, Minnesota, where these photographs were made, I never answered that question to anyone’s satisfaction. I’m not sure I had a real answer. Every day for two weeks in the summer of 1976 I went to South Minneapolis and walked around with a small camera for hours, photographing strangers. I wanted to be able to shoot quickly, without technical fuss, so I preset my wide-angle lens for maximum focus in the bright sunlight, walked as close as I could to the people and situations that interested me and, without hesitating, raised the camera and snapped -- then walked on. If the people I photographed noticed me, which was most of the time, I tried hard to be polite in this politest of all major cities. But of course I knew I was intrusive. Most often, they were puzzled. After a few moments, they decided whether to be amused or uneasy, depending on their natures. Sometimes they were angry or frightened when I singled them out. Then I retreated swiftly. Sometimes they were scornful. I had to decide it was OK to be dismissed as rude or crazy.

Sometimes they asked me why. I only knew that I wanted these pictures very badly. Looking back, I see myself as an outsider with my nose pushed up against the American window, both mocking and coveting the life within -- one I vehemently rejected on principle. I wanted to penetrate the bland, appollonian surface of midwestern culture, to rip it away and glimpse what lay beneath. At the same time I wanted to belong in neighborhoods like these. 		   
 


And there was more. I believed in the miraculous then. I believed it was shimmering in these ordinary summertime streets where mothers with strollers chatted, where men in cut-off jeans lovingly washed their shiny cars. Nothing is ordinary, I told myself. No one -- or was it everyone? -- is sacred. I pushed myself into the buzz of human activity, seeking confluence, pattern, juxtaposition-- seeking pure, numinous light. I thought if I brought these unrepeatable moments back to my darkroom, if I printed them and examined their stilled complexity, I would understand something about human life that had always eluded me . My photographs seemed simple facts, but I believed they would reveal mysteries.

Twenty years later I no longer believe in these things. I live in another city, another time. I am in the tumultuous midst of a life, and I no longer want to be invisible. I’m part of a family now; I go to work, own property, walk my daughter on tree-shadowed sidewalks to her neighborhood school. Today I know more about the people in these photographs than I did when I made them. With this knowledge -- freighted as it must be with ambivalence and regret -- has come compassion. But something has been lost, too.

When I was walking around South Minneapolis 20 years ago, camera poised, I was like a stranger in an exotic land, listening intently, passionately, for traces of an ancient visual language I believed the natives had themselves forgotten, no longer even knew they knew. And when I look at my pictures closely now, it occurs to me that perhaps I was right. Perhaps I understood that language -- a few words at least, a broken, corrupted phrase or two. Perhaps I even managed to record it. What’s clear to me (and this is not a tragic thought) is that 20 years later I can no longer separate it from the background of everyday life. Perhaps it’s because that language has finally been subsumed into me. Perhaps I have become what I photographed.

By Tim Connor

  
   
   
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