this section is, of course, closely tied to “glimpses.” as i wrote there, moments of connection and intimacy are to be spotted everywhere, more and more so as the private increasingly and rapidly merges with the public. as roland barthes’ writes in camera lucida, we have undergone “the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.” when i think about this, i picture each person or group of people walking around, sitting, and existing in the outside world enclosed in an invisible bubble. how permeable that bubble is is up to the person or people inside, but it is a bubble nonetheless— a bubble of the private existing in the public. in this sense, i picture everyone carrying their private selves, emotions, and conversations with them wherever they go— this imagery is especially apparent in big cities like new york where the person next to you on the subway might be crying, laughing hysterically, or performing otherwise self-conscious-associated activities without a drop of shame or hesitation.

to go outside with no other motive but to people watch is to catch others acting freely within their little bubbles, witnessing sometimes large, sometimes beautifully small moments of intimacy or humanity: the emotional and joyful reunion of two dear friends at a street corner, or a man stopping to light a cigarette on a crowded sidewalk, delicately cupping a hand to block the gusts of wind as strangers whiz by. i read this barthes quote recently in a jenny wu piece called frozen time. in this piece she describes glad, the photograph taken by moyra davey of a fridge covered in receipts, magnets, schedules, and cereal and snack boxes. she writes that “davey has framed something as mundane as a refrigerator in such a distinguished way, a reminder of what a keen eye can do to otherwise banal surroundings.” here, even something as regular as a fridge is worthy of our lingering eyes, a moment of visual observation. wu goes on, “when we examine davey’s photographs,” “we become voyeurs of her candid or at most semi-staged life. […] our only task— the only thing our eyes can do— is simply look, look, look.” it is increasingly clear to me that looking, observing, watching, or whatever word you might use, is one of the most important tasks and, incidentally, one of the most rewarding ones, too. below are some of the humans that i’ve observed living wonderfully within the bubbles of their public existence.