So here’s the deal: I’m early. Not fashionably early, not strategically early. Just early. Standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall like some kind of ceremonial parking cone, waiting for Dan and Ciara to show up and get married in a way that doesn’t count except that it counts more than anything that’s coming in July with the catering and the centerpieces and whoever’s parents are paying for the whole goddamned spectacle.
This is the real one.
And I’m the witness. Which means I have to be here. Which means I’m standing on marble that’s seen ten thousand versions of this same scene, holding my camera because what the hell else am I supposed to do with my hands, and I’m pointing it at myself because they’re not here yet and I need evidence that I showed up, that I was ready, that I held space for their quiet revolution.
That’s the thing about being a witness: you can’t witness your own witnessing. You can only document the waiting. The gap. The moment before the moment when you’re just a guy on some steps with a camera, playing at meaning before meaning arrives.
Frank Lloyd Wright said San Francisco is the only city that can survive all the things we’re doing to it and still look beautiful. He was talking about architecture, probably, about the violence we do to skylines and neighborhoods. But standing here, I think he was also talking about this: the way the city absorbs our small ceremonies and our large lies, the way it takes our secret weddings and our public weddings and our failed marriages and our stupid ideas about forever, and just holds them. Doesn’t judge. Doesn’t care. Just keeps being beautiful in that merciless early morning light that makes everything look like it matters.
I’m checking the frame, looking at the screen, at the little glowing rectangle that shows me what the camera sees. Which is supposed to be me but is really me mediated, me translated, me as subject and object simultaneously. I’m adjusting the angle, making sure the building’s in the shot, making sure I’m in the shot, making sure the whole tableau of ceremonial readiness is properly composed.
And that’s when I see her.
Not directly. Not in the world. In the reflection. In the screen. In that little glowing window that’s showing me myself, I see Niki ride past behind me on a bicycle.
She doesn’t know I see her. She can’t. Because I’m looking at the screen, not at the world. I’m facing City Hall with my camera pointed at myself, and she’s behind me, moving through the frame, and I’m watching her in that small translated space where everything is flipped and mediated and somehow more true than the thing itself.
I don’t turn around. I don’t call out. I don’t acknowledge what I’m seeing.
And I let her go. I let her pass. I stay facing forward, camera pointed at myself, watching her departure in that little glowing screen like it’s a movie I’m not in except I’m completely in. I’m the foreground, and she’s the background, and we’re in the same frame but in completely different films.
The camera lets you see without being seen seeing. It creates this distance, this buffer, this plausible deniability. I saw her but I didn’t see her. Not really. Not in the way that counts. Not in the way that would require me to turn around, to make eye contact, to wave, to break this whole careful composition I’m building about being present for someone else’s moment.
So I choose the frame. I choose the photograph. I choose to let her ride past in the reflection while I stay locked in my pose, my angle, my self conscious documentation of waiting.
And that choice, that specific, cowardly, self protective choice to see without acknowledging, to witness without being witnessed as witnessing, that’s in the photograph now too. That’s baked into the image. Me on the steps, “Absolute Solipsism” as the tag line, looking at myself looking at myself, while someone who matters rides through the background unseen except by the camera, unacknowledged except in this mediated space where I can see everything and claim nothing.
The universe doesn’t just have impeccable timing for comedy. It has impeccable timing for tests. For those moments where you have to decide what you’re really doing there, what you’re really looking at, what you’re really willing to acknowledge. And I failed it. Or passed it. Or something. I stayed in the frame. I kept composing. I let the moment happen in the reflection and nowhere else.
That’s what you can’t plan for and can’t fake but somehow always end up doing anyway: the way we choose our mediations over our encounters. The way we’d rather see people in screens than turn around and face them. The way we use our cameras and our purposes and our obligations to other people’s ceremonies as excuses not to engage with our own still-unfolding disasters.
But I was here first. That’s what this picture proves. I was here, in the gap, holding space, pointing the camera at myself because I needed evidence that showing up matters, even when you’re early, even when you’re alone, even when the moment you came for hasn’t happened yet. Even when other moments, other people, other possibilities, other versions of your own life, ride past in the reflection and you choose not to turn around.
The light’s perfect. The light’s always perfect. That’s what Wright was trying to tell us.
The city just survives what we do to it. Survives our little screens and our big evasions and all the ways we’ve learned to witness without engaging. And somehow, impossibly, it still looks beautiful.
I love your photos so much!