Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows,
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 1.Prologue
Three frames of Romeo and Juliet playing dress-up.
The first shot, Romeo alone, backlit, all brooding silhouette, clutching that jug of milk like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to earth, wants you to believe in solitude, in the pure ache of romantic longing. And the milk, Christ, the milk. That primal, infantile hunger for the breast, for sustenance, for the thing you can’t name but would die without. That’s the longing that makes you stupid and reckless. The second gives you Juliet in close-up, and suddenly the whole story pivots, becomes hers, becomes about the interior life we project onto that face. The third? Both of them together, and now it’s about the space between bodies, the tension, the whole doomed machinery of desire and death. Three pictures. Three realities. All true. All bullshit.
My camera: it doesn’t capture jack shit. What it does, and this is the magic of my camera (really all cameras), the filthy gorgeous magic, is it makes you believe it captured everything. The whole moment, the complete truth, all wrapped up and delivered. You look at one of these shots and your brain goes, “Yeah, that’s it, that’s the whole story,” and you stop questioning. You move on satisfied.
But stack three of them together from the same afternoon, same location, same two bodies in absurd costume, and suddenly that sense of completeness shatters. You see what the frame included and what it left out. You see the choice, this angle not that one, this instant not the one three seconds later. What you’re looking at isn’t some objective record of what happened; it’s my editorial decision, my instinct about what mattered in that specific sliver of time. It’s a truth, one version, one take, one way of seeing not the truth that somehow contains all the others.
What photography really did, what it continues to do when we’re not too lazy or too scared to admit it, is prove that reality isn’t some fixed catalogue of facts we can measure and pin down like dead butterflies. Reality is a roiling ocean of relationships, shifting, bleeding into each other, refusing to hold still. Every frame is a decision about what matters right now, and the next frame will contradict it, and they’ll both be right.
These aren’t documents. They’re arguments. They’re three different people trying to convince you of something real, something that mattered, something worth freezing in silver and light. And the beautiful, terrible thing is: maybe we did.