the one who sees and the one who is seen. I am conscious. They are not. I know the photograph is being made. They don’t. For a moment, this gives me a strange power over them. They have stopped performing, stopped protecting themselves, stopped controlling how they appear to the world. I haven’t. I am present, watching. They are somewhere else. There is something intimate in that distance, and something uncomfortable. I am looking at someone who cannot look back. There is tenderness in it, but also intrusion. I don’t want to resolve that contradiction. The photograph exists because of it. The voyeur is conscious of the person being watched; the person being watched is unconscious of the voyeur. One has control. The other has surrendered it. And somewhere between the two is silence.
