VPID 005

Warm out isn't it? The two of you stand in the scant shade offered by the overhang of the K-Mart entrance. I can only surmise that you didn't bother to visit the store since wherever you're from there is probably one in your neighborhood. Sad isn't it, that the mom-and-pop stores are as much gone from where you live as they are here? But the shade is welcome as you pour over the map held between you like an elementary bridge connecting your journey from or to the East Village. You are obviously tourists, (welcome to NYC:-) and you are currently enacting one of the many rituals that tourists worldwide engage in: attempting to discover one of two things - how to get out of where you are now, or conversely how get to that other place that looks like the destination of your dreams. This image of you standing, heads together, thoughts of location coalescing into a single forward step in unison, isn't so much out of the ordinary in photographic terms, but rather it is so much in... It is composed of the everyday - which makes it exceptional. You may not know it but people swirl around you avoiding collision and veering off in directions of their own. Some of them are tourists as well though they are perhaps less prepared than you. I see no maps in their hands.