Reflections
Some things aren't hidden because they're difficult to see. They're hidden because nobody thinks to look.
For years, I stood in front of the stage at the Backyard waiting for the next band to walk out. The lights would dim, the crowd would press a little closer, and everyone around me was focused on what was about to happen.
I kept looking up.
High in the branches above the crowd hung an old bicycle.
It wasn't tucked away or hidden behind a building. It was hanging in plain sight, right over the heads of thousands of people who gathered there every weekend. Every now and then, someone would notice me staring into the tree and ask what I was looking at.
“There's a bicycle up there.”
Most had never seen it.
For a moment, it felt like sharing inside knowledge—not because the bicycle was hidden, but because they had simply never thought to look.
The bicycle is gone now.
One day it disappeared, along with another small piece of a place that meant so much to so many people. Had I not stopped to make this photograph, I might eventually begin to wonder whether I had imagined it.
That's one of the reasons I carry a camera.
Not to chase extraordinary moments, but to preserve the ordinary things that quietly disappear while everyone else is looking somewhere else.