This bridge was by far one of my favorite projects yet. Although photographing strangers made me incredibly uncomfortable at first, I found it to become easier and easier. Living in a city where I often feel as though nobody wants anything to do with anyone else, it was very difficult for me to initially approach people, let alone photograph them. However, after the first person I photographed I realized that if you compliment people on something (their outfit, their hair, etc.), it allows them to become a lot more open to the idea of having their picture taken and makes the entire situation seem much more natural. This bridge made me think a lot about street photographers such as Brandon Stanton, who do this sort of thing dozens of times every day for a living. I feel as though it would be an incredible exercise to try and photograph maybe five people a day. In doing this, I believe that one would become much more sociable and aware of their surroundings and the lives that others lead. One word to capture this feeling would be sonder. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines sonder as: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
