Lyle pointed out once there are few people in my pictures, at least in ones I post here, but it's the chance portrait I love best, facial expressions, gestures of hands and heads, textures of clothing, skin, hair, and the incidental light--the variables you can't control with a snapshot. Either it takes great love or great aesthetic distance to photograph people, maybe both at once, I feel that somehow, am confused by what feels wrong in it, but to show the photographs is unequivocally to stare. To look for their presence without their knowledge of my looking. Our looking. Because now I am showing you what I mean: see them? I don't know who they are. Only that as they walked into the banquet hall together, he was blinded by the sun in the window. Only that he gazes in my direction because I stand in his path. He cannot see me in the darkness ahead of him, but he knows, they both know, the camera is taking their picture. I am speaking to them, holding them up, thanking them. They are poised and triangulated. This is their composure together. For now, they tolerate being seen.
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