For me, perhaps the greatest motivation for engaging in street photography is curiosity. Not a salacious voyeuristic curiosity (at least not always). I would like to think that my curiosity is driven more by empathy than by a desire for some weird sense of gratification. I want to know what other people are doing. I want to know what makes them tick. Inevitably, I find myself imagining what my life would be like if I gave my world a quarter degree turn. Or woke up occupying a different body.
A black car pulls to the curb. A man gets out and runs around the corner. Five minutes later, he returns with a wheeled rack of garment bags. He pops open the trunk and begins laying out the garment bags one by one. I wonder what he’s doing. It’s Friday. Maybe he’s picking up clothes for a Saturday wedding. Is he the best man?
But there’s steam and steam gives the scene a vaguely sinister aspect. Maybe these clothes aren’t for a wedding. Maybe this man is a funeral director and he’s picking up clothes to dress his “clients.” Maybe he’s the leader of a cult and needs to dress up his followers before he doles out the Kool-Aid.
Or maybe he’s a co-conspirator in a planned heist. He and his friends are going to do a high-end casino and they need tuxedos so they can look like high rollers. A fine idea except for the fact that Toronto doesn’t have any high-end casinos.
I should apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the true account of the situation. Obviously, each garment bag holds a dehydrated alien and the man has been summoned to dispose of the remains before conspiracy theories leak and run amok through the city. He’ll run the bodies to a nearby construction site and encase them in concrete before anyone notices.
