One summer I began taking pictures

of people on the street surreptitiously, by

holding the camera at my waist and aiming

it at passersby when they were about six

feet away. It was important to avoid eye

contact and to keep walking as I pressed

the shutter. When the film was developed

I would find images that I could not

remember having taken.

What was most surprising was how

much the subjects of these photographs

seemed so intensely to inhabit their

gestures—something rarely seen in

photographs. In a gesture or a glance,

these people passing by and glimpsed

invisibly in a split second were present

as they never are when observed directly.

Later I recognized some of these

gestures as belonging to the movies:

great actors on screen achieve the same

thing by learning to inhabit themselves

just as these people do: naturally, that is.

They achieve a natural state in the most

artificial of media.