The Spy Who Loved You

What started out as a project to grab some "native vocabulary" in the countries we visited soon became an obsession to explore the intricacies of the printed and written word in public.

In Malmö I had chosen to make my first foot foray down to the industrial area along the waterfront, and the loading quiet, mostly quiet even on a workday, since everyone is inside and invisible. This allowed me to get up to the signs on the doors, where I was rewarded but a rich variety of words and typography in stark, readable patterns, as one finds in that kind of environment, where the message must be communicated clearly, as a matter of life and death sometimes.

But a couple days into Sweden, I realized that I had become obsesses with what were actually very common signs and phrases. I saw the same ones in Gothenberg as well, in the course of normal wandering around the city near our hotel.

So I upped my requirements---I wanted to find the elusive, interesting written messages that are scattered throughout the world. I soon began pushing the limits of photography in public, amidst people, and at close range towards fine print and handwritten signs, up close above key holes on doors leading to private spaces.

I soon became a master at grabbing these kinds of shots with the phone. Mostly it was very easy. The smartphone lets you look like you are doing something else---say, texting or looking at a map, when all the while you are taking a snapshot of something at knee-level right in front of you. By this means I could often get the quirkiest and most interesting little signs, stickers on fire hydrants, all the while not giving away my project.

This last bit may strike some folks as funny---why did I care if people noticed me doing that? Objectively I didn't, but somehow it was easier to get lots of good shots while I stayed in the normal flow of the people around me, without turning on the bright flashing light of awareness that a photograph was being taken.

Sometimes it doesn't matter that you are photographing. People expect it certain cases---for example if you are taking a snapshot of a famous landmark that all the tourists visit. Or if you are taking any kind of selfie in a random place. People understand selfies, to be sure.

But if you are walking down a street in a normal business district and you pull out your smartphone to begin taking pictures of say, posters on the side of a building, that have been put there and are rotting away unnoticed, or of a large sign above a grocery store---in other words anything that isn't normally photographed---then people are sometimes very distracted by it. Momentarily they want to know what is going on. They stop walking in the same stride. They cluster around you. They walk into your shot and pose for you, right smack in front of the words you were trying to photograph.

All of that was a lot of grief for me, when all I wanted to be was in the flow and vibe of the normal. So I became a spy of sorts, to get what I needed without sending too may ripples in the cosmic pond.