This is a picture I did not take

of a woman and a lizard suspended in a slow-motion Butoh-style solo dance street performance early on a Sunday morning, half a block from the Carl's Jr. where everyone buys crack, her dance more of a half-frozen stumble, illuminated by a thin shaft of sunlight lighting-up her square of sidewalk, her body bent at the waist and her arm reaching down as if she were picking-up something that had fallen to the street while her four-foot-long iguana perched high on her back, its scaly head high and mouth open, black eyes blinking back the brightness.

Nor is this a picture of thirty-five other things from that morning, all less than exceptional but no less memorable, thanks to a camera I believed to be loaded with film but was instead loaded with air -- no wonder the winder worked so well. Though now, the idea of going out for a morning of photographing people with an unloaded camera seems like a kind of street theater itself.