To be honest, I am still unsure of how I felt about Charles Traub’s lecture. I found his photographs beautiful and intriguing, and I have great appreciation for his ability to capture these fleeting moments, as he said, in such a minute time frame. However, I found his dismissal of modern day hard to stomach. I, too, tend to romanticize the past, and it is no surprise that as a man who spent so much of his life capturing the essence of glimmers of humanity in the 70s and 80s, he finds such heroism in the decades themselves. I disagree with him, though, when he claims that today’s streets don’t harness the same livelihood or manifest a sense of style as he witnessed so evidently in the 70s and 80s. While I admit that the modernity of social life has attempted to veil human emotion and vulnerability, I propose that the same could be said in the decades he photographs. The only difference is how the veil takes form. This is not to discount, however, the social events which have taken place since Lunchtime was photographed. The social climate has altered drastically in the past three to four decades; however, this can provide a more complex, challenging scope for the photographer to break through.