Unphotographable

This is a picture I did not take

of a tall, greying man with crooked teeth whom I've encountered three times while photographing downtown, and each time he's approached me quickly from the front with a long stride, and each time he's leaned toward me and said the exact same thing "old one's are better" while palming his ancient brass Leica, opening his hand enough to show me what's there, but not enough to really show-off, and the one time I got him to stop and talk to me, he told me a story about how he's been shooting the city for the last forty years, all in black and white, and how incredible the 80s were because the office workers in the financial district looked like zombies, and how he's never shown his work to anyone, but how he harbors a fantasy of returning to eastern Europe in a sports car with a young woman on his arm so he can show his mother how he's turned into an art world success.