Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

The rain speeds up things - people dashing across the street - and also slows some of us down, this guy waiting under scafolding. He had a backpack, and one piece of luggage, and spoke in what I think was Italian. Mostly. He kept pointing at my camera and mentioning, channel 13. I couldn’t piece it all together. I think he was saying that his son was working for channel 13, and was in charge of producing a show about Italy.

No, I didn’t smell wine on his breath. I wonder whether he was a sort of lost Howard Hughes type, wandering around the city pretending to be homeless, but was in fact a secretly wealthy Italian with a son who worked for channel 13.

At any rate, this falls under the category of a street portrait in that I spent some time listening to his stories until he started to make a fist at the passersby, and seemed to go off on some wild tangent about television signals. At that point, I said, ciao - going along with the Italian thing - and he raised his knuckles at me and grinned like a madman, saying - ciao bambino. Ciao!