Slightly Nutty Street Photography

     Like The Prisoner, this old lady looked desperate to escape from an oppressive world. She kept on looking far ahead, eagerly waiting for her bus. I figured that, as a person who did not really care about how she looked to other people, she felt extremely oppressed by the ubiquitous marketing of the fashion industry. The two large and disturbing twin models on the billboards, with their impeccable hair and their inexpressive Terminator look, seemed to be chasing her.

     As I was wandering in a not so funny amusement park (although I had a great time there with my mom and my two kids), I noticed this couple several times in different places. They found it hard to walk and were cruising from bench to bench, enjoying the view at each new location. And they were the very first to notice the park's mascot, a pretty strange and disturbing human-sized rabbit, as it suddenly went on stage.

    Gazing on the new soft mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors (John Keats). I took this picture at the heart of the COVID-19 crisis, when people were so frightened that they were always wearing a mask. Like these two parents and their child (wearing a russian hat, not a mask) during a family walk in the snow. Small lumps of snow were falling from the trees and looked like small masks made of snow, as if the global fear were bleeding onto nature.

    The old man was having a coke in a small and empty veggie joint downtown. He looked so sad while drinking his Coke that I thought of this old slogan of Coca-Cola, omnipresent in France in the eighties : "Cette sensation s'appelle Coke", replacing it in my mind by "Cette sensation s'appelle tristesse" which seemed way more appropriate. But english slogans would work fine too like "Life Tastes Sad" or "Open Sadness". We really should distrust ads.

      For once the scene lasted quite a long time. There was this young boy with his edgy hair cut, looking completely out of sync with the joyfully frantic atmosphere of the great spring fair. He was standing near his family waiting for someone, and after a while he felt so tired that he leant over the counter of a shooting range. His solitary attitude, his weariness and his strange gaze at guns were disturbing enough to make me wait for the right moment.