Untitled, Sidewalk c. 1970

Joseph Mills made this black and white photograph, sometime in the recent past, probably with a handheld camera. It looks like it was taken on the fly, maybe without thinking too much. A man's legs and feet are caught in the act of moving. The shadows they cast are longer, more stretched, than the objects themselves. The shadows are quite strange, like dark paint, flowing. Down there in the lower right, is that a discarded newspaper? I’ve never been much of a street photographer myself, but I find the work of other artists fascinating. I feel for Joseph Mills here, trying to make something out of nothing, turning the ordinary into something poetic, and it reminds me how much the world offers us, if only we're looking. It makes me want to grab my camera and go for a walk, see what I can see, what I can turn into art, and get into the flow.