I took this portrait of a man I met by chance on a New York City street. I remember thinking that he appeared to be waiting for something or someone, and we looked at each other. I introduced myself, and we spoke for a while, including about ourselves. When he said he had fought and been wounded in the Korean War, my immediate response was to say that it was hard to imagine what he must have felt as a black man in America in 1950 going off to fight in this war.

How much is each of us waiting for someone to try and understand what we feel, to show some awareness of what we have experienced? What I said to this man was a small step in this direction, but it affected him. His expression here is a mingling of weariness and yearning. I didn't want him to seem weighed down or alone, and I think this had to do with my choice of background: the out-of-focus buildings and windows suggestive of other lives. And there is that energetic line sweeping upward through the diagonal strap across his chest, and continued in the curve of his collar and tilted head and cap. It leads our eye to the brightest area of the photograph in the upper right--a corner of open sky.