Clinch

Hamilton is a tricky city to do street photography in. As there isn’t much variety in the name of entertainment, and a large persistent poverty rate has kept many citizens short on cash for a few necessities, beer, cigarettes and weed it is too easy to make cliché shots of people just walking around. That’s what Hamiltonians do. We just move about from place to place within city limits.

We wake up, get out of the house or apartment, walk or drive somewhere uneventful in an uneventful way, and walk or drive back. It’s quite rare to see someone so enthused about life that they do back flips or something on their way to a destination, like you might see in a Garry Winogrand picture.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to recognize that most Hamiltonians are bored, and many have said exactly that to me.

As much as I want to show a town of vivacity, I don’t want to have to show the reality that some citizens act like they’re living in a pressure-cooker society and don’t know how to constructively deal with it. Nevertheless . . . there it is.

I had to call the cops for this one. I think it would have gotten nastier if I hadn’t. It wasn’t a play fight. These two seemed determined to beat the crap out of each other right there in the street.

I have no idea what got this one going.
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