iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Paper Cups & Pennies ~ |
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This scene takes place in the middle of the Pont Saint-Michel, a simple but significant gesture, in the heart of thriving third world Paris.
This stooped and staggering little old lady haunts (almost literally, she looks half dead) the side streets of Saint-Germain des Prés; I've been seeing her for several years now, and she seems to spend her life in a perpetually uneasy equilibrium between upright and upended.
Her garb seems to suggest a faith, although what she might have faith in, given her current standing/swaying I wouldn't presume to proffer.
Perhaps she has faith in little boys in bright red cagoules placing pinched pennies into her eternally extended paper cup.
It's difficult to say, but as classic fotograffer's fodder, she features in far more folks' photos than she could ever begin to imagine. Although I shouldn't be making assumptions about her imagination. Anyway, what's difficult to say, is whether she registers this unasked for attention for all the wrong reasons, and whether she resents it or just sees it as another marketing opportunity.
Whatever the case, she doesn't move fast enough - she barely moves at all - to ever complain and the scuttling sneaks of street photographers who profit from her are too mean spirited to ever hang around to find out, as if she were going to give them a good hiding with that third leg of hers for their callousness and insensitivity.
She could probably tear the skin from our self-satisfied souls with one look from that painful, pitiful though. That's the real reason we don't wait around to meet it, I suspect.
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© 2011 Sab Will / Paris Set Me Free - Contact me directly for photo tours, interviews, exhibitions, etc.
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