I came upon this scene at a mannikin factory, and what you see here is the image from an overexposed slide. The only manipulation I've done is to adjust for the overexposure. It's possible someone at the factory may have positioned these throwaways on a whim. In any case, they look alive and as though they are relating to each other, at the specific angle the photograph was taken. (The scene in the upper-left corner was a reflection of the surrounding trees.) When I went back to reshoot it properly sometime later, the factory had closed and this scene was gone.

What I see in this photograph is the paradox that we know, if we are really honest with ourselves, that we are inhabiting flesh machines. Some of us are focusing on others; some are focusing on something else; and a very few, like the woman front-center, have lifted their gaze to something that transcends this world.

I can't claim to have seen all this consciously when I took the photograph. Here is the element of synchronicity in photography when it becomes really intuitive. All I did was to keep hunting for angles until this scene popped into view, and I realized that the figures looked as though they were all relating to each other. I think, if I remember, I did have an intuitive sense of excitement, that it had meaning, but I don't recall how articulate that understanding was at the moment I snapped the shutter.
--Stephen S.