Photographs
Despair and Beauty, or What I Found
A decade of photographs
1997-2006
All these people searching for explanations. Look in their eyes; they seem to look inside despite the crowds that crowd around them, despite the flagrant sensuality of the scene. Caught, some of them, not by the camera, but by their own thoughts, and perhaps, fears.
And now we share their very intimacy. We’ve found and stopped their time.
For me as the photographer, who throws his camera into a scene hoping only to take with him evidence, and perhaps to turn that evidence into something to look at, there is terrific intimacy and despair, sadness, death, silence here. Dreaminess. My dreams reflected here too, my insistence on being in all cultures and times at once. You people are, then, my immortality. By knowing you, I know all the ages, places, people. All the despair and beauty.
There is beauty, right? Beauty in the lines and color, the shapes. Mostly in the intimate poses. The way a hand holds bag, the way a girl holds her hand out for her mother, the way a foot rests on the ground. The despair, itself, beautiful, isn’t that just about the stubborn coin of human existence. Because it’s so personal, intimate, and you know: the truth about reality. That even the young girls don’t stay young. The girl in Paris, now fourteen. A French girl of fourteen. Worse, who here isn’t still alive?
There is a visual beauty, as well, and those are the things that for me connect these images. The hands and lines that appear to leap across the page. The shadows, each of a different day, a different place.
It’s not the differences that matter.
