On Portraiture
There was something magical about the camera. It offered a peculiar permission to enter another person's world, to approach the boundaries of the self, to undress the familiar arrangements by which we make ourselves known.
I was never particularly impressed by who stood before me. Their reputations interested me less than the encounter itself. What might be offered, what might be withheld, and what, in spite of us both, might unexpectedly appear.
The camera was a curious instrument. Its presence could disturb the delicate fiction of who we believed ourselves to be. Sometimes it invited an opening; sometimes it met an impenetrable wall. There were moments of extraordinary tenderness, others of discomfort, uncertainty, or the almost comic determination of a person to remain entirely themselves.
I discovered that intimacy could arrive very quickly between strangers. The camera gave us permission to look, and to be looked at, with an attention rarely afforded in ordinary life. Something could pass between us that neither had anticipated.
As a young man, I spent time photographing residents of a local home for the elderly. I had gone there curious about old age, imagining perhaps a world distant from the urgency of my own. Instead, I encountered something reciprocal. Two very different fields of energy meeting, each nourishing the other. There was laughter, mischief, tenderness, and the quiet astonishment of being alive together. The distance between our years seemed, at times, to disappear.
Elsewhere, the encounters took on their own particular weather. There were rooms heavy with unspoken emotion, moments when a carefully composed public self seemed briefly uncertain, and others in which the performance remained quite impenetrable.
And occasionally something alchemical occurred.
With Sister Wendy Beckett and Mitsuko Uchida, I remember an extraordinary feeling of lightness. Everything flowed. The air itself seemed full of light, joy and life. For a little while, the distinction between looking and being looked at seemed almost to dissolve.
Yet the camera could never insist upon revelation. A face might open and still conceal an entire life. What appeared to be intimacy might be a performance; what seemed like resistance might be another kind of truth. There was no reliable way of knowing.
Perhaps that was what drew me back. Not the possibility of possessing another person's truth, but the brief suspension of certainty in which two people might encounter one another without quite knowing what would happen.
The photographs remain.
Something of the light, the gestures, the faces.
And somewhere beyond them, all that passed between us, which no photograph could ever entirely hold.