When I think of street photography, I think of people, their candidness and their everydayness being, all-at-once, seen. Of subways and hopskotch and running late. Being at work or having no place to be. Ordinary stuff made visible. 

I don’t really think of the streets themselves, only of all these strangers and their lives witnessed, if just for a brief moment.

When I go out with my camera now, though, there is nothing but emptied student rental houses, closed shops, and wide streets to witness. All the actors are gone, and I’m left on a closed set, an emptied plastic bag blowing by occasionally like a tumbleweed along the pavement. Cinematic.

And all the more so because of spring, which officially began three days after Governor Wolf declared a state of emergency in Pennsylvania. Since then, serviceberry, redbud, dogwood, and magnolia trees across town have blossomed pink and white while birds chatter in the light mornings. All ready to shoot. Ready for anyone to say, “Action!”

***

The other night, I walked down the middle of the street on my way home from a stroll. I heard the kick of a crushed Coke can and caught eyes, through the windows of the parked car between us, with a deer. I didn’t move and neither did the deer; I don’t know how long we stared at each other from either side of the car. Then I heard others move on the sidewalk behind me, and turned to see four more. They weren’t nervous as deer usually are, the one by the car slowly making its way in front of the hood, passing not three feet from me (closer than I’ve been to humans in many weeks), and joining the rest on the other side of the street. They slowly walked up the sidewalk together, as if walking home but having nothing to do once they get there. And I kept walking, too, in the opposite direction, inexplicably sad to leave them. 

And I thought of an essay Annie Dillard wrote about a weasel and a moment she’d locked eyes with it and very briefly, shockingly, traded brains. She wrote that she learned then “the weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity.” For the time being, though–for the pandemic–we are living in necessity and not in choice, as the weasels and the deer. This is what crises do, shift our methods and our expectations for being. And maybe this is why the deer were so content to be near me. And why, on the streets, I feel like an actor with no fellow cast members and no director, playing the part of the person still living in choice.

As the deer left me, I wished at first that I'd had my camera. Then, I wished instead–as if making the right wish truly mattered–that I could go with them, that I could, like Dillard and her weasel, “very calmly go wild.” But for now, I’ll put off wildness, I’ll keep taking street shots, and keep witnessing an altered ordinary.