I often question if my inner world is bigger than my outer world. I view my inner world as a paperback book and my outer world is an independent film. My inner world is made up of history, my outer world is news.

But this week while I was in Norman, Oklahoma, I was reminded of how big my outer world really is.

The television news business is incredibly inbred. That is the cleanest word I can think of off the top of my head to call it. Every discussion I had with whom I believed were complete strangers would start off with, "Oh you are from WESH, well do you know...." "Since you work in Springfield, you must know...." "You are at KCNC, does ----- still work there?" Within a few sentences, we would find we know many of the same people, just at different times and places.

The world is not just a circle. It is concentric circles, it is interlaced circles, it is circles that only touch each other at one single point, yet allow it to be connected to another circle. As I stood in a hallway with KOAT photographer Todd Ziemek, KTSM photographer Jesus Gallegos, and WRAL photographer Chad Flowers, three of my worlds converged into one. Suddenly my Albuquerque life, met my stint in El Paso, who was introduced to my Raleigh reality. It was like three marbles touching the edge of a fourth marble in the center, but not touching each other, yet they were all connected. These are three people who might never otherwise meet except for me standing in the middle of them. In another situation, I was one of the independent circles that was quickly absorbed into a bigger circle -- like when soap bubbles touch and they allow another bubble to become part of their surface. My Albuquerque association with Amy Bowers linked me to Dirck Halstead, Mark Bell and John Premack. It is like a flesh and bones version of the world wide web.

One of my favorite moments of the NPPA Workshop was meeting a fellow Behind the Viewfinder contributor. On the last night of the conference I was eating dinner and happened to glance behind me at the folks from the Platypus workshop. (I will let them tell you what is a Platypus). One of the faces was particularly familiar. Is it someone I know from a previous station, maybe someone I know from college, possibly someone from Raleigh I met on a shoot and forgot their name? No, it was someone I had never met in person, yet he was as familiar as any of my co-workers at WRAL. As he stood up from the table, I yelled out, "Are you Tom Burton?" He gave me that "you know me, should I know you" look, and then I introduced myself. We sat down in the middle of the dinning hall and quickly talked away the better part of an hour. He needed to call his wife and kids, I was meeting my parents to open my belated Christmas presents, but we could not stop talking. I took great joy out of the irony of Tom shooting and editing videos all week and I had not rolled an inch of tape since the previous Friday, yet I was constantly snapping off pictures with my little Kodak Advantix and he had not unpacked his still cameras since arriving in Oklahoma. In a way we had switched worlds for a week.

Tom and I then discussed how bizarre it is to meet someone you have only seen in a two dimensional medium such as on a screen or printed on paper. As Tom says in a journal last year, it is the difference between seeing someone round instead of flat. Meeting everyone in Oklahoma just made my world a little rounder.

Behind the Viewfinder Contributor Tom Burton with his Platypus gear during a recent project in Racine, Wisconsin Photo © 1999 Mark Hertzberg

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