Last week I photographed a few Dave Matthews concerts at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The second night, the concert ended at about 11PM. I packed up my stuff and fought my way through the happy throngs and started walking to my car, which was parked in a Cubs lot about 2 blocks away (thanks to my friend and fellow photographer Steve Green). The crowds on Clark Street were huge, mostly heading south to all the bars in the area. I walked one block south and turned on Eddy Street, and walked past Sluggers Sports Bar to the parking lot directly behind it, got in my car and went home.
The next morning, I woke up and went to the corner to buy the paper. The front page story was about an FBI sting operation that caught a guy who threw what he thought was a bomb into a garbage can in front of Sluggers Sports Bar shortly after the concert. On the news that night they showed the corner that I walked past to get to my car, about five feet from that garbage can at about the time that the incident took place. Although the FBI had control of the guy from the beginning, and it wasn’t a real bomb, it still makes you think. Would I have been there when the bomb went off? Would I have just walked past? Or would I have been photographing the aftermath? Sure makes what I do for a living pretty insignificant in the scope of the real world.