Three Kings And A Dog

Three young men occupy a narrow balcony on the second floor of an aging urban building, leaning on the railing, talking, smoking, watching the street below — an ordinary afternoon scene repeated on every block of every city. But beneath them, scrawled in large crude letters across the building's facade, is a single word: HARM. The juxtaposition is accidental and unavoidable. The men didn't put it there and probably stopped seeing it long ago. It has become part of the architecture, as invisible to them as the traffic light on the corner or the fire department notice bolted to the wall beside it. Shot in black and white with a film-like grain that gives the image a timeless urban quality, the composition divides cleanly into two halves — the human world above, with its gesture and conversation and life, and the concrete world below, with its blunt declaration. The railing casts shadows like bars across the balcony. The men don't seem confined, and yet the image can't help but suggest a cage. The photograph finds its tension in what the subjects don't notice — the word that frames their daily life, the message the building sends to everyone except the people who live in it.