Over the past six months, I’ve shot pictures for our upcoming book City Light all over Our Formerly-Fair City, from Rainier Beach to Carkeek Park and from White Center to Lake City. Almost everybody I’ve talked to on my rounds loves the book idea.
Only a few, mild, expressions of disapproval have been given–a mall cop perturbed when I started snapping inside Northgate’s parking lot, a couple of guys walking out of a tavern who thought I was a private eye hired by their wives, stuff like that.
OK, there was the day at Lake View Cemetery when I did the requisite gravesite tour (Bruce Lee, Doc Maynard, the Blethens, etc.) when a tall man with rasta hair boomed at me in a revival-preacher’s voice: “Your pictures will never develop, because your heart is not pure!”
But a more direct verbal attack came yesterday. I was shooting away on the sunny shores of Lake Washington, at Mt. Baker beach, when a 40-ish lady strode up defiantly and sternly yelled, “You shouldn’t ever do that!”
She’d decided that I wasn’t taking scenic shots with comparatively small, faceless figures in them, but was really doing secret close-ups of young children, and refused to believe my denials.
“Don’t you know,” she scowled, “that the classic profile of a pedophile is a man, alone, taking pictures of other people’s kids? Should I call the P.D. right now or what?”
I offered to show her the digital images I’d captured thus far, images with nothing more than tiny, shadowy silhouettes of kid and adult sunbathers against the bright vastness of lake and sky. She refused. I offered to hit the delete button on everything I’d taken at that site. She just repeated her “classic profile” speech. She stormed off to join two other women; I walked off toward my next shooting site of the afternoon, the Colman Park P-Patch.
She was right to care about children. She was wrong about me. And she’s wrong to imagine the worst in other people. I could have told her that she, as a black woman, might have a little more sympathy for folks being unfairly “profiled,” but I didn’t. I could have also told her of at least two other still photographers who were in the vicinity of the beach whom I hadn’t seen her go after, but I didn’t.
Instead, I went along my rounds worried about what might happen if I were somehow arrested on suspicion and had my images searched for material someone could misinterpret to determine what sex-and-power kinks I might have. Would pictures of tunnels and underpasses mean I was straight? Would images of construction cranes mean I was gay? Would images from Woodland Park Zoo mean I was into bestiality? Would a scene of the Safeco Field roof sliding open mean I was a flasher? Would those gravesite shots imply necrophilia?
And what would a law-enforcement profiler think of my shot of the “golf ball” radar tower at Discovery Park in a rainstorm?
