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 ancient unembarrassed thirst that makes grown men into idiots and idiots into corpses. That’s the longing that makes you stupid. That’s the longing that makes you reckless. That’s the longing that gets you a tomb at sixteen.
The second. Juliet in close-up. And suddenly the whole story pivots, hands itself over, becomes hers. And her face. The face. You think you’re looking at interior life and what you’re actually looking at is me. Where I stood. What I cropped. What I let stay in the frame and what I cut out at the edge because it didn’t serve. You’re seeing me decide she looked like that. The face in front of you is partly hers and partly mine and partly the light that afternoon and you will never, ever, not in a thousand years of looking, know which is which.
The third. Both of them, together, finally, and now it isn’t about him and it isn’t about her. It’s about the inch of air between them. That sliver. That nothing. The whole doomed machinery of desire and death compressed into a single gap that neither one of them is closing because neither one of them can, because if they close it the story ends, and the story ending is the only thing scarier than the story continuing.
Three pictures. Three realities. All true. All bullshit.
My camera doesn’t capture shit. Let me say that again because nobody wants to hear it. My camera doesn’t capture jack shit. What it does, and look, this is the magic of my camera, the magic of all cameras, the filthy gorgeous lying magic, is make you believe it captured everything. The whole moment. The complete truth. All wrapped up and delivered with a bow. You look at one of these shots and your brain goes yeah, that’s it, that’s the whole story, and you stop questioning, and you move on satisfied, and you have been had, friend. You have been gloriously, beautifully had.
But stack three of them together. Same afternoon. Same location. Same two bodies in absurd costume. And suddenly that sense of completeness shatters like a dropped bottle. You see what the frame included. You see what it left out. You see the choice. This angle, not that one. This instant, not the one three seconds later when she laughed and broke the spell. What you’re looking at isn’t some objective record of what happened. It’s my editorial decision. It’s my instinct about what mattered in that specific sliver of time. It’s a truth. Not the truth. A truth. One. Mine. Not yours. Mine.
Photography proves something I struggle to admit, or maybe it’s refuse? Like refusing, white-knuckled, eyes-squeezed-shut refusing that reality isn’t a fixed catalogue of facts we can measure and pin down like dead butterflies under glass in some smelly museum drawer in 1903. Reality is a roiling ocean sized slurry of relationships, shifting, bleeding into each other, refusing to hold still long enough to be photographed. Which is exactly why I keep trying to photograph it.
Every frame is a decision about what matters right now. And the next frame will contradict it. And they’ll both be right. And they’ll both be lying. And that’s the deal.
These aren’t documents. They’re arguments. Three arguments. Three different people I was, in three different seconds, trying to convince you, trying to convince myself, that something happened that afternoon worth freezing in silver and light.
And the beautiful, terrible, ridiculous thing is: maybe I did.