Simply Spring XIV - La Dame Pipi {Paris Photo}

La Dame Pipi du Luxembourg © 2015 Chant Wagner

Technically speaking, it is springtime until June 21 although there is a heat wave right now taking place beforehand.

This picture was taken in early spring, hence its cooler colors...

it represents what the French colloquially call a "dame pipi", a job of the underground and subterranean world of the cities.

I remember taking a photo of a dame pipi in Brussels once asking the lady if I could take her picture because she looked so ancient, frail, ready to disappear, and barely existing to the eyes of the world mostly located on the surface of the earth.

At that time, I was not doing conscious "street photography" but I believe that when your instinct pushes you to ask an old lady in the stairs of a lavatory if you could take her portrait, it then touches upon one of the deepest reasons why you feel the necessity to take pictures of strangers who are fellow human beings: make the nearly invisible be visible, and make the nearly non-existing, exist.

I don't even understand sometimes why I take certain pictures and am sometimes surprised after the fact. But I know that I love photography for its capacity to relate to states of consciousness. Your state of consciousness before, during and after the taking of a photo. This is why you pick a picture which has meaning for you sometimes only much later.