Something and Nothing
During my summer adventure, while on the hunt for provisions around Todi in Umbria, I found myself in a queue of traffic. As we crawled forward it became clear that there had been an accident.
A badly damaged car, its front caved and bonnet broken, its windscreen spiderwebbed from a point of impact, sat stationary in the oncoming lane. Its passengers were shaken and milling around. Lying slightly in front of the car, between it and the verge was the motorcyclist who’d hit it, their bike lying in the field beyond.
The emergency services had yet to arrive on the scene and as we filed past I made eye contact with the woman holding the motionless motorcyclist’s helmet still. She met my gaze with a dazed pleading expression as I rolled past, then the car was between us.
Pretty much every instinct within me wanted to stop and photograph the scene. I could do no good as a first aider, my Italian is by no means strong enough to get involved in such a situation, so I drove on.
I had a friend in the car. We were supposed to be buying lunch ingredients. I was confronted with a microcosm of atrocity, of events caught in the act of changing lives, and I blanched.
The thing that scared me the most was the reaction of those involved. Not the prurience of my inclination to photograph that which was happening around me, but the need to be liked and accepted. My chief concern that were I to start shooting, I would feel the wrath of those nearby.
In the time since I have wondered that if the emergency services been there I might have felt safe enough taking pictures, given that the fates of those involved would be sealed, that it would be an aftermath of an event, rather than the event itself…
I have no idea what the result was for the motorcyclist.
They could be back at work or school, feeling lucky or cavalier, or they may never have left the verge they landed on.
Perhaps it was in this spirit that I returned a few days later and took the photo above, a nothing photo of a mark on a road, something that does no justice to the events that took place there a few days before.