We are not awake
This is another in a series of walking around shots, this time, taken in San Francisco.
Back in 2007 I was walking to work quite a bit and I’d usually follow a pretty similar path. This was also in the heyday of sidewalk stenciling, where people were taking their message to the streets quite literally, spray painting stenciled illustrations and sayings on the sidewalks and crosswalks around town.
Along this one section of my walk was stenciled this message:
We are not awake to the changes happening within.
I quite liked the message, it was something to ponder while on my walk. But what struck me was the way in which it was delivered.. The stenciler broke up the message across a long stretch of the block into ever-increasing length, starting with a simple
We
We are
We are not
We are not awake
etc., etc., until the full message was displayed. It was a great way to get ones attention.
This image isn’t spectacular in itself, more a documentation of the message and the medium. To that end, I wanted a close cropping on the words but I wanted to provide some contextual visuals as well so I left in a few of the sidewalk cracks. I decided to offset the positioning just a little and only provide some of the sidewalk cracks, so that I didn’t end up with a completely balanced composition – I like the slight uneasiness of the framing. Other than that I just set the camera and shot. I used my older Canon SD point and shoot camera for this shot as it was the camera I had with me. As I’ve indicated before, I’ll always carry a camera of some sort with me – these days at the very least a cell phone camera but usually a full camera (if only a point and shoot) for better control over the images.
