People Watching in Photo

       I wished to capture the idea of "People Watching" with this series of photographs. People watching is what you can learn from a single glance, but what you can learn from a moment of seeing.  One can gather an understanding of mannerisms or habits from a brief moment in time. The activity of people watching shows there is a increasing presence of awareness of the whereabouts of people as well as their activities.  As Philip E Agre mentions in "Surveillance and Capture," there are many new ways of tracking people's activities (for example through UPS's package tracking systems and camera surveillance).  This increased presence of photographic technology hasn't seemed to change everyday human behaviors much, which is what I intended to capture with series of three photographs.  Cameras and technology allow people to "gaze upon the previously unknown"as Richard B Woodward puts it in "Dare to be Famous: Self-Exploitation and the Camera" and in some sense do create a hunger for it, by the ability to share the unknown or hidden (a non-photographic technology example).  The knowledge that cameras are out there and can capture your personal moments, does stop people from having them in public.  In fact, some people choose to ignore cameras, while others might be so used to their presence they are oblivious to them.  I took a portion of my pictures in a tourist area so that the presence of the camera would not be out of the ordinary and I could easily capture some personal moments.  I also chose to create sequences of three photographs because this provides a stronger sense to the viewer of the big picture of what is happening and a person's mannerisms.  A single shot may be an accurate depiction of a single moment in time, but that picture without some context of other pictures can create a misinterpretation of what actually occurred.  A series of pictures better allows the viewer to see the context of the moment and not misinterpret two people walking together for two strangers walking side by side that happen to share a glance.