Photography as a Love Language for the Introverted Heart

I remember you looking at me and me looking at you. I remember this tacit understanding of things. I remember the silence, the pause, feeling your eyes on me, in your inner world, and me being a part of it somehow, by surrendering to you, your eyes. You always said we could touch with our eyes and now maybe I can see that.

Photography as a love language for the introverted heart. The distance and the closeness, the devotion, the depth, the loss of oneself in the act. Touch. Being someone’s object of devotion, a vehicle for their thoughts. I’ve always seen photography as a way of love and desire, a way of accessing someone’s soul, as the portrayer and the portrayed.

I remember sitting in front of my mother’s camera for what seemed like hours on end, and cherishing this bond that we had where I could feel her heart speak in the sheer action of observing the light fall on my body and the environment surrounding me. Her world was one of tonality, in black and white, where she observed every slight change of light, gesture, and would pause. Time stopped, and she would dance around this moment where I existed only for her, my thoughts absorbed in bliss in this action of love I could give to her impenetrable soul.

I guess it was only natural for me to be drawn to the camera as a way of not only seeing the world but also being part of it. As a silent observer who found emotional connection to self and others through the lens. I thrive into looking. Only in the distance did I find a way to love, a form of desire in restraint. The inherent distance that the camera creates, masking our face and expressions to others, for us to keep, and yet revealing our movements, our bodies exposed in a trance like dance around the chosen topic, a feast of desire and methodical pressure in our core.

A moment of agony and pleasure in which one can linger for eternity. My eyes linger on you, and I see you from this space in my heart, where the light falls on your face in a certain way and you are divine to me. Where I wish I was one with the camera to be able to possess this moment once more, and it’s gone, and I want you even more for it might and certainly will never happen again.

I have observed countless strangers with these eyes, where I could marvel at the beauty emanating from them bathed in light, oblivious of their own blissful state of being. I have observed friends in this state and have kept my feelings of these moments in secrecy within my heart, my eyes staying on them with a loving touch.

The blue light on your face in the early hours of the night, the new moon greeting us and a myriad of light on the horizon shining through the night. When you bite your lips slightly and wet them with your saliva, glistening touch on red skin caressed by sunlight. The play of light and shadow on your skin under the trees in the afternoon sun, the wind blowing through the leaves.

How I see you, how I touch you in this way. How I desire you in this way. I love you in light and shadow, in the act of seeing, in the act of transcending the ephemeral, unbounded by time, holding you, holding me.