Scene on the Road

This week I'm on Route 206 in central New Jersey, driving north from Hammonton toward Trenton in Burlington County. If you listen to traffic reports on KYW radio, you know the weekend boiler plate announcements: "Westbound Schuylkill backed up due to zoo volume...Kelly Drive closed for a regatta...the Martin Luther King Drive closed for recreation and in NJ...both north and southbound 206 is slow, with folks headed to a flea market in Columbus...."

So as I approach the several acre Columbus Farmers Market on a bright sunny morning, it is with anticipation of seeing hundreds of bargain hunters at the outdoor flea market. Well, the outdoor market is open Thursday, Saturday and Sunday year round. I'm here on a Friday. So what I see are rows and rows of empty 12 foot wide spaces with empty wood tables, and in the middle of it all -- two trucks. Beside one, Art Weyman is tossing boxes into the back of a stake bed truck. Behind the other, a garbage truck, is George Faber. They and their crews are out early cleaning up the grounds after a busy Thursday, getting it ready for the weekend.

Weyman is normally the one who opens the flea market gate at 5 am -- most of the vendors have been waiting since 3 am. "I'll line them up like horseshoes, like a big S," he explains later during his breakfast break. On this day though, "three guys called out," so he's picking up cardboard for recycling with seventeen year-old Don Cummings (in passenger seat, at right), in his third year as summer help. It doesn't take long to fill up the bed, even with mother nature occasionally undoing their work: "seems like everything we start card-boarding, it gets windy."

Angel Lova with vendor left-overs.

Working with twenty year-old Angel Lova picking up yesterday's one-of-a-kind antiques and collectibles -- today's trash -- Faber asks me if I want the discarded copy of On Photography by Susan Sontag I've spotted. Her classic 1977 collection of essays included a line about photographers just like me-- and you? -- taking pictures, on road trips and elsewhere : "Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality."

I let him toss the book into his bin along with old clothes, a pillow, a chair, a broken lamp and a framed still life.

Here's a thought for the day.

Sontag described photographing people as "something predatory." Comment below on how you feel about her view that "..to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."

So, what do YOU think? Does photography steal your soul?


Let me know. And don't forget to send in your favorite American flag photos for posting here during the week of Fourth of July. Email jpegs as attachments to Roadtrip@phillynews.com.