This young man seemed happy. When we met on the street, he started asking me about my camera. Like all kids, he was curious. But as I was focusing, he crossed his arms in a pose that I found curious. Body language experts feel that crossed arms may indicate that a person is feeling defensive, self-protective, or closed-off. Body language researchers at Princeton classify this look as a “low power” pose. I’d like to think that it just symbolized “caution.” It was probably just a natural reaction to having a 6’6″ guy shove a five pound camera in your face. Still, it revealed something about his personality compared to the hundreds of other kids I photographed in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood during the mid-1970s.
