If We Could Talk A handful of stories we never shared because I never asked. This daily visual journal project took place from January 2015 to May 2015. Shot and posted daily over the course of ninety days, If We Could Talk is discrete, small, behind closed doors and in close quarters. It is sneaky, instinctual, and invisible. It’s a fly on the wall and it’s waiting as we’re all waiting. The images are true and the stories are tributes to those I want so much to cheer on but am too timid to talk to. As If We Could Talk’s creator, I shoot the arrow and paint the bulls-eye around where it lands. Your story begins where my gaze ends. I am the author and audience. I am enamored by who I think you are.
Using the camera phone as a pen and invisibility cloak, I study what would usually be invisible. The eyes may be the portals to the soul but our life is transcribed upon our hands. The palm is not the only volume to hold our tales. The knuckles, the nails, the veins, the cracked skin, the pristine dermis, each a chapter bursting with stories. Who we touch, how we provide, how it feels to be you: these are the stories we never shared because I never asked.
The square format is familiar and suggestive, like peering through a window or picking up an old Polaroid. It feels familiar and intimate; each part of the frame is equal and easy to get behind. The secrecy behind the image satisfies my need for intimacy in New York City. The secrecy of the shot and the close-quarter environment plays into framing the extreme close-up images. The focus and abstraction of the whole present all and nothing simultaneously. The lines and frames intersect creating individual jigsaw pieces waiting to be placed in a long-lost puzzle.
I invite you to unlock and decode each image. I hope you will find mystery in the mundane and dare to make something out of nothing. Find a story, find a hero, find a far-far-far-away but most of all, find your connection through our gauzy, guarded city. Be it fact or fiction, allow yourself the enjoyment of the worth mentioning and worth-making up. Your story can land you in your sweetened sense of self-worth. You can do that even with your social anxiety and averted stares. I welcome you to share in the fable connection; it can be enough for now. At the end of the day when most of us are most weary, I imagine revitalizing your spirits. I wish you knew how much I am rooting for you but I am still too shy to say.