Faces by Rick Hartford

We are hunter-gatherers. At a moment's notice, our tribal chief says: "the beast has to be fed." And we must go. The beast, of course, is the newspaper. Its appetite is insatiable. So, we ride. And we look. The hunt is all absorbing. We are hungry. We roam. We look for something that moves. A person. A face. We have all, at one time or another, become crazy during the hunt. One of my closest colleagues was looking so hard for a photograph she crashed her car. She saw something. It became everything to her. After hours of searching I came to Main Street in Hartford late in the afternoon. I saw the construction zone at the Hartford Atheneum. There were the faces. There is something here, I thought. Something. But what? I parked the car and crossed the street and waited. A woman got off a city bus and walked up to me. She asked me what I was doing there, with my camera. I pointed at the construction cloth the museum had put up. Something will happen here, I said. She laughed. And then she left. And then a man came walking down Main Street. He stopped at the edge of my canvas, too far to the left. He looked in at the construction. Come on, I prayed. Come on. And he moved to the right, and peered in through a peephole. The faces, they looked at me. Their eyes sparkled. I thanked the lord of the hunt.