Whatever

Whatever.  I like this photograph.  It makes me happy.  This woman, the single mother of a growing son, a working mother with an imagination, was fascinating.  She lived upstairs in an apartment building.  She had to walk the stairs.  She worked all week in an office and on weekends as a promotional model for a liquor company.  She had a much younger boyfriend.  She laughed about that with both pride and self-deprication.  She did not shoot nudes, she said.  Never had.  Me neither, I said.  I hate them.  But sometimes people are naked in my photographs.  I would not ask you to do something you didn't want to do.  O.K. she said.  I've had a child.  My God, I said.  Do you know the paintings of Edward Hopper?  I've seen her modeling pictures.  She does not look like this in any of them.  She looks like a model.

I worry.  I think people will tire of my photographs.  I think they will flip through them rather than look at them.  But I can't quit looking at them.  I can't believe I was allowed to make this picture, that we were able to make this picture.  We talk forever before we ever shoot, the model and I.  I ask them everything about their lives.  I want to get that in a photograph.  I look at this photograph and think of her alone in her room, staring, thinking with nobody looking at her, the inward gaze.  Nobody sees her like this.  Ever.  Holy shit.  Holy shit.

There is plenty to do, plenty to write about.  Fuck it.