Twelve people in matching white ball caps, and not one of them is aimed the same way.
The caps do most of the work. Same white, same small red logo on the front, handed out by whoever organised the day. Without them this is a dozen strangers standing near a wall. With them you read the whole group before you read a single face in it.
Most have stopped. Arms folded, backs against the parapet, weight on one leg, that particular posture people get when the walking is done and the bus hasn't come yet. The woman in the grey wrap in the middle of the frame is turned fully away from me. So is the one beside her with the patterned bag. In a portrait that would be a failure. Here it's the reason the thing holds together, because I'm standing where nobody is looking.
Two are still working. The woman in the pink sweater on the left has the camera up at her eye, pointed off past the edge of the shot at something I never saw. The man in the tan shirt with the fat strap round his neck is holding his camera down by his hip and laughing at whatever the guy opposite him is acting out with both hands. Count the one slung across the chest of the man in black and there are three cameras in the frame. None of them pointed at the view.
The light is bad and I like it. Sun near enough overhead, hard shadows pooled under everybody's shoes, the white caps and the pale stone both sitting right at the edge of blowing out. Behind them the background is flat haze, a whole hillside cooked down to a grey-white smear with the contrast boiled off. Nothing back there competes for attention, which is the only favour that kind of light ever does you.
Colour comes from two places: the pink sweater, and the tree overhead, which keeps dropping small red flowers onto the metal grate at the bottom left. The grate gives the frame a floor. The branches give it a lid. Everything else is denim, black jackets and stone.
What I keep coming back to is the joke sitting inside it. A crowd of people who brought cameras, photographed by someone with a camera, at the exact moment they'd all put theirs away. The picture they came for is behind them, out of focus, half dissolved in the haze. The one worth taking had been standing around in front of them the whole time.
