Before I knew what I was doing
These are not my best photographs.
The focus wanders, the colors have the washed-out look of the compact camera I owned back then, and in at least three frames you can see my thumb in the corner because I had not yet learned where to put my hands.
I took them years ago, in a seaside town, with a machine I would barely call a camera today.
I was just beginning to discover what it meant to look at the world through a lens instead of merely looking at it.
I knew nothing yet. But I looked at everything as though it were the first time—because, in a way, it was.
I was there with someone I still was not sure I could call anything definite. We were seeing each other. Neither of us had named what was happening yet, and that was precisely the best part: it could still become anything.
There was a connection. The real, rare kind you cannot explain or manufacture—it is either there or it is not.
For a few days, in that town scented with salt and streets too narrow for cars, I photographed the sea, the peeling walls, the late-afternoon light that, at certain latitudes, seems designed to make everything look more important than it really is.
She is almost never in these photographs. Back then, I had not yet learned how to photograph people—I trusted landscapes more.
But she was there in every frame. In the way I chose that light and no other. In the time I gave to an ordinary wall, simply because that afternoon I was happy and did not quite know why.
Then we went home, each returning to our own life, and whatever had existed between us—we had not even had time to name it—faded by itself within a few weeks.
Not with a fight. Only with the ordinary silence of things that were not yet strong enough to survive the distance.
It is not a sad story. Only a short one.
What remains of that trip are these imperfect photographs, taken by someone who did not yet know what he was doing—with the camera or with that person.
And yet, looking at them now, I understand that this is exactly why they are worth something: they do not tell the story of a technique. They preserve a state of being. Someone still learning how to look, and not yet afraid of being seen while doing it.
I took many other photographs from behind the lens, protected by that distance.
Not these. In these, for once, the photographer is also the subject.