Thomas E Dackow – Elsewhere: Street Portraits

My practice is to carry a camera with me. Occasionally, fortune allows me to capture a glimpse of things which illustrate the duality of our uniqueness as individuals and the commonality of those threads of experience we share. One such thread which I am particularly intrigued by is when we are “Elsewhere”.

In the course of navigating through life, there is a constant interplay between what we see and what we think, where each view of the word intersects to some degree with the other. We mentally envision our goals and physically embark on paths to achieve them. But there are times, when the world of thought so overwhelms the physical, that we momentarily stand, oblivious to our surroundings.
In extreme cases this state is forced and achieved in the midst of traumatic events, and often that is how we think of it. But that is not my focus. And far more commonly it arises, instead, as an escape enabled by a moment of relative peace where our navigational devices can be relaxed and suspended. These are the moments I find so intriguing: where the mental world predominates in stark contrast to the physical world in which our subjects are embedded: captured in this duality by the flick of the shutter.
To us, what is vivid and apparent is what is invisible to them and to them what is brilliantly revealed is hidden from us: alluded to only by the feint enigmatic expression on a face.