...it doesn't matter that this is out of focus. sometimes, most of the time, the context supersedes the details...minor details like composition, focus, message, lighting, etc. minor. what we have here is a document. a document of a particular time and place for which i am particularly thankful because although that continuum did not last in 'legal' terms it is still inspiring and fresh and ever present and vivacious and filled with honest exchanges...at least, until the beans were spilled and real life took over. these two kids were born very far apart from each other in the late '40s and early '50s. Both had had significant others and maybe even insignificant others since they were 11, 12, 13...by the time they met each other, timing and earth and space and moons had all shifted until the sun met gemini met capricorn and boom...some things are lovely like that...and i like to think about it often: that we could exist in different time zones all our lives and then at some point, have tea together at 4 in the afternoon. that's what i'm going to be thankful for this thanksgiving. wherever the eff i am, and with whoMever...the one in the shorts was an open always beautiful bud that attracted both malicious and non-malicious honey seekers...she had already expressed, written, danced, traveled, compromised, and loved by the time she met the man in the one-sie PJ outfit...the man in the long pj's had a plan, maybe rough, maybe clear...maybe clearer now, as he sits at a dining table in southern England. by the time he arrived onto this frame, he, too, was 'grown,' but his interests had just began to pique, and this overlapped with the rest of things like tradition and habit and custom that take time to flush out of ones' system, no? the man in the pj's and the woman in the shorts have both always been magnets...some season decades ago their attractions pulled them together and there you have the picture... ...what i really want to say about the photograph, however, is simply that regardless of the look (fuzzy, low-res, ill-lit, misfire composition)...THEIR looks, of pride, of love, of youth, of happiness, of the perfect present, of union...are maintained and triumph over the pedestrian air and science of this particular photo...they LOOK and SEEM TO THINK they were being shot by a large-format-camera...with all that depth and all those nooks and crannies and details and picas and shine in the eye and that pride in knowing what documentation really was...and THAT is the sign of two kids from working class backgrounds. that is the only way one knows how to express something as delicate as PRIDE in a way so genuine and heart-breaking...performing for an invisible audience, maybe performing for the upper class: beauty beats money every day...these kids know who they are...and that is how i see my mom and pop in their pj's on some sunday morning in eastern canada many years ago...mom, calmly moving along her path with her brains and beauty and her insatiable heart and pop, very far from home and his mother and his language and his boys and those colors and the music and the rhythm and pace and it couldn't BE colder than where he came from...i like to assume that in their conversations and in each other they had, instead, found a space unlike any other. it lasted like anything else....lasts.
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