Powerless people cannot, because being noticed by forces larger than yourself, in my experience of the world, had almost never meant anything good.

It meant bill collectors and bureaucracies and people with authority who could take things from you.

So my first assumption, seeing myself documented in those photographs, was not curiosity but dread, the automatic dread of the small when the large turns its eye toward them.

It genuinely did not occur to me, in those first moments, that being found by powerful people could be the best thing that ever happened to me.

In my experience, it never had been.