Sweet surprise | Scene Through the Lens

That’s Alexander Milne Calder’s 37-foot bronze sculpture behind the fountain spray, above. I have been photographing William Penn standing atop City Hall for as long as I have been carrying a camera around Center City Philadelphia. Last week, even:

Yep, talking about taking pictures of the same things over and over and trying not to photograph them the same way. Again.

Whether it’s school board meetings, the coming and going of anniversaries and recurring events, grip-and-grin photo ops, Mummers and fireworks, old Wawas or just simply the “collecting” of images, you’ve read it here before.

But I’m not the only one. At least where it concerns Mr. Penn I’ve got a kindred spirit/seer.

Anton Klusener, The Inquirer’s newsroom art director, found the sculpture grabbed his eye while traveling through the city or emerging from the subway. “Like spotting a friend in an unexpected place,” he says. “The same sweet surprise.”

While looking through Inquirer staff images on the paper’s server to use in a collage, Klusener realized that he had seen Penn appear in several photos of different contexts, and from that he got the idea that it would be “fun to assemble in one big canvas, photos of different aspects of Philly life, but into which Mr. Penn had snuck — the original photo-bomber!”

Many of the photos he gathered for the double truck center spread in yesterday’s newspaper are those I made, while trying to see the same things in new ways.

Klusener feels, “on some deep level, that whenever we see another human figure, we feel a sense of connection. Especially so when you’re in a remote area and you spot a figure on a distant landscape. I don’t find myself looking for him as much as he seems to find my eye!”

And then, there’s the trying different ways to photograph a big stationary ship — while on another, moving ship.

» READ MORE: The SS United States berthed - for a bit longer - in South Philadelphia

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: