The Space Between Two People
An encounter between 2 complete unknown strangers
There’s a kind of trust that doesn’t show up in a single portrait. You need two people for it. You need the gap between them to close, even just a little, and you need a camera patient enough to notice when it does.
I didn’t understand this until I started photographing people together instead of alone.
A solo portrait is a negotiation between one person and the lens. But put two people in the frame, and let their guard down around each other, even briefly, even for the first time, and something else appears. You stop photographing bodies. You start photographing the distance between them, or the lack of it.
What still surprises me, every time, is how often the two people in front of my camera didn’t know each other an hour earlier. COMPLETE STRANGERS. They shake hands at the door, make a little small talk while I set up lights, and then I ask them to stand close, to touch, to exist in each other’s space as if they’d done it a hundred times before. And somehow, more often than not, they do.
I used to think that was strange. Now I think it might be the whole point. Two strangers don’t have old habits to fall back on, no history to perform. Whatever closeness happens between them in that room has to be built fresh, in real time, out of nothing but a willingness to be near someone. A hand resting on a shoulder that, an hour ago, belonged to someone they’d never met. A forehead dropped against a stranger’s collarbone because it suddenly, unexpectedly, felt comfortable. The best frames I get are almost always the ones where I can tell the two of them forgot I was in the room, where the fact that they’d just met falls away entirely, and what’s left is just two people who, for this one afternoon, decided to let each other in.
I think that’s the real subject of this kind of work, more than fashion or art or technique. Closeness. Not the romantic kind necessarily though sometimes that too but the plainer, more durable kind. The kind where someone lets you lean your full weight on them without flinching. Where being looked at, closely and for a long time, doesn’t feel like exposure, it feels like relief.
