I have been reading Guibert again. He writes about photographing Thierry’s dying body with such tenderness and such hunger, and what moves me is not the beauty of the photographs themselves but his admission that the camera was both inadequate and necessary—that he photographed because he couldn’t bear to lose what was already lost, and that the photographs didn’t preserve anything except the fact of his looking, his failing, his hopeless attempt to hold on.
The photograph proves that beauty existed. That’s what Barthes said, more or less. But in proving it existed, in making it past tense, the photograph also proves that beauty is over, that it has passed into the realm of the having-been, that it is no longer here, no longer now, no longer happening in the urgent present where beauty actually lives.
This is the terrible bargain: we trade the living thing for the image of it, and the image is always lesser.
When I first met Sofi (ig @soufois) , she picked up my Italo Calvino letters and read through while posing.
An Italian comparative literature student in Paris Soufois is different from anyone else I’ve photographed. Every shoot is an adventure and sometimes, she comes up with the adventure herself— as she did when we did the Alice Guy shoot together.
But here is a series we shot on our very first time meeting. I had little repertoire when it came to props. A pearl necklace and some head tiara thing was all I had. And a bronze fabric I was obsessed with in my shoots.
None of these ‘looks’ were planned. I’d just throw things at her and say, try this. Oh and try this. Oh and why not that? let’s see what happens. I’m not a fashion photographer— far from it. Sometimes I wish I had a make up artist who would help me…but in the end, it gives a roughness or rawness to the series which I’ve come to like.
I’m not a Francesca at all, as people think I am. Woodman’s every scene was well planned.
I have no plan. It’s like having a first sentence and then hoping your fingers do the rest of the work.
So today, i give you Sofi.
