I sit on my porch steps between the weeds growing up around the rusted cellar door and the sparse Carlton Avenue foot traffic. On the sidewalk, a man makes his way up the hill. He wears a blue medical mask and carries five overstuffed grocery bags from Ahart's. He tries not to catch my eye.

I say, "How're you doing?" He stops and looks up at me sipping coffee, sitting on the stoop rather than in my cheap plastic lawn chair. John Prine spills softly from the boombox in my kitchen through the screen door.

"This is crazy, ya know," he says. "I was supposed to have a job today removing the mold from this woman's house. She's got it. Can you believe that? She's a nurse and her husband's a doctor at St. Luke's and that's how they know she's got it. He called me last night and said not to come. Can you believe that? And I was just there."

I say that that's awful, and really scary.

"You know," he says, "they're saying that animals can't get it. Dogs, cats, birds. They can't get it. And you know, I just wish I was an animal right now. I really do. They can't get it. I wish I was an animal."

***

Everyday I walk. Everyday, I feel threatened and like a threat. The people I pass on the street won't look at me; one of us will move off the sidewalk, into the grass or the street, to leave room as we pass each other. We avoid each others' glance.

Then, I'll walk down the street with a camera. And everything shifts, stretches, opens.

Someone shouts across the street, "You must be getting some good shots!"

A woman loading her car in front of C-Town stops and asks, "You wanna get my picture? Cheese! (I know you can't see it in the mask.) Prayers and be safe."

“I thought of you and your documentary project,” another man, a friend, says, “at my father-in-law’s funeral this weekend. A funeral with only 20 people–not everyone wore the gloves and masks, but I did. With my suit. You’d’ve gotten some interesting shots; I’d never been to a funeral where no one could touch each other.”

On 4th Street, another man bending over the opened hood of his car quits tinkering and says, "You gotta go around the corner here. You wanna get that light over there at this time of day. I've been living on this corner for years and my backyard is basically a bird sanctuary. Good nature shots. And all this light."

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes, "the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of 'Look,' 'See,' 'Here it is.'" So it goes, it seems, with being photographed: Look, See, Here I am. It is as if the camera, the mechanism itself, interrupts the wariness and caution we're all carrying with us through the streets. Holding it between us makes it somehow possible–even desirable–to look at each other again. "Clearly," as Walter Benjamin writes, "it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye."