I will skip most of the back story behind this picture. In 1974, as a grad student in the School of Business at Indiana University, I spent several weeks in Caracas Venezuela assisting a professor who was teaching at a private school there. Part of my responsibility was being a courier, carrying {via taxi} punch cards from the school on the outskirts of the city to a computer center in the center of the city, waiting several hours, and then returning with the output. I knew this would put me in the center of the city with nothing to do for several hours, so the briefcase I purchased was slightly larger than needed for this task - one with just enough extra room to hold my Canon rangefinder camera, so I was able to wander around taking pictures during that time.

My usual practice when developed slides arrived was to triage - one pile to be filed immediately, one pile to be trashed immediately, and a "I'm not sure" pile. By the time I started scanning slides, the "I don't know" boxes of slides filled several cubic feet of moving boxes, as we moved from Indiana to Kansas to Massachusetts and them back to Indiana {about 100 miles from where we started}. In the past year I have finally taken on the chore of doing something with those slides. When I looked at this picture last night I decided that my first evaluation nearly 43 years ago had been right - I wasn't prepared to deal with it then, but being able to view it as something to be scanned rather than as something to be projected allowed me to change my perspective. The right half of the original slide was negative space. By cropping off that area, I basically changed it from a 3:2 orientation to a 2:3 orientation. The shoeshine boy is just a blob - but {please do not get into politics here!!!} in some sense his customers were the important people and his identity was totally irrelevant.

Remembering that this is a crop of a slide, so the underlying image doesn't contain any more detail than what you see here, I would be interested in reactions from others.