Contact

Contact

1- Is missing. 2- I’m standing naked in front of a mosquito net, my hands loose at my sides. I’m looking at her, trying to look like a quiet sexy. My skin glows white in front of the muddy gray net. I’m wearing her scarf as a headband, its tail draped over my shoulder, covering the left nipple. There are three white scratches across the frame: one entering the room from the window, one shooting out of my belly button, and one going straight down my penis. 3- I’m standing bent over in front of the bed, reaching towards the fan. My hand is blurry. My face is hidden. 4- Another quiet sexy. You can’t see my penis in this one 5. My upper body viewed from the back as I’m sitting on the edge of the bed leaning forward. My back looks like a thoughtful pile of rocks, or perhaps a morose elephant, about to topple in an avalanche.

They call it a contact sheet. Maybe because it is the only time the photographic paper and negatives ever come in direct contact. They don’t need the tension of empty space between them to throw them into focus. This is a meeting point between the two elements. It produces a total map, the condition of the images, so that decisions could be made about the future.

6&7- I’m lying on my back, hands behind my head. I look at her again. This time I’m weary. Tired, but longing. 8,9,10&11- She is lying on a long thin swing suspended by four ropes over a sandy beach. Her hand is clutching one of the ropes tightly. She’s afraid of letting go. There is an open book face down on her womb. The sea has ebbed, and all you can see in the background is a wet rocky desert.

What can you do with a contact sheet? It’s just a succession of events. Just enough details to understand what happened, but not enough to really know what happened. You can’t crop; or enlarge; or change the contrast. If you had the negatives this would be a different story. But all you have is the contact sheet.

12&13- The beach. 12 with a palm tree, 13 without. They’re both only background, which is really what we wanted it to be. Just a warm place for us to meet. To figure out our future. 14- Another shot of her lying on the swing. I must have realized the fragility of the situation, and tried to make it more substantial by taking one more photo. As if by capturing her there I would actually capture her. 15- She’s sitting in a restaurant looking at me across the table. She’s wearing my leather Australian outback hat. It’s cocked on her head, and the rim is hiding her left eye. 16- Me in the restaurant, again wearing her scarf as a headband. I’m doing a 2/3 profile, looking off into the distance, and trying to feed the camera my most attractive angle.

You can contact her now. You can’t contact her then. You can’t contact yourself then either. You can’t tell yourself to leave the country to be with her, and hope that this might have caused things to end differently. And you can’t crop the images on a contact sheet to make it look like it ended differently either. The whole story is right there for you to see.

17,18&19- Pictures of a headless man driving a motorboat we are sitting in. 20&21- Very muddy pictures, almost impossible to see through the gray. But if you look hard