If there is anything I want, it is that they know.
I want them to know what we were like. What we were really like. Not just us being happy, or just us being mad. Not just us being glamorous, or sexy, but what we felt, what we valued, what we found – our joy, our life, and ourselves – in.
I often wondered what my parents looked like before I was around. Not what they looked like when they were all done up, or out on a date, or at the beach posing for the camera, but what they looked like in their day-to-day, moment to moment, when they least expected how they presented themselves to be scrutinized and recorded. What was my mother wearing the day I was conceived? Where had my father been, who did he speak to and what about? What kinds of things had been occupying their attention? Was the house neat and orderly, or had one of them been doing something and let things get messy? Where where they in their lives when I came along? Who were they before I was?
The thing is, they don’t remember. Not exactly, not with the clarity of a photograph. And all of the stories I may be told cannot amount to any sort of objective narrative (not that photographs accomplish that task any better – but the illusion of doing so is so seductive we tend to ignore that fact).
And so if there is anything I want, it is that they know. I want our photographs to help impart a feeling of who we are, to show the textures and rhythms of our life. How we live, what we choose to emphasize and what do we choose to excise, where our attention goes, and how we grown and change. How we choose to shape life and are shaped by it.
More than a desire to know me, or us, intellectually, I hope that our work will allow them to know us emotionally – I want them to know what we felt was important about living. I want them to know that Love between people is the only true measure of value.
I want them to know of our Love, I want them to know where they came from.