“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
Diane Arbus
When, during the course of your life, do you cross the threshold from childhood to adulthood, from maturity to senescence? Are there quantifiable moments, epiphanies, doors through which you enter into another dimension, another state of being? Is it merely a gradual chronological process or does something happen, a sudden intuitive realisation that you are no longer the person you once were?
The children have all grown and some of the others are no longer with us. These are photographs of people I have known or whom I have crossed in my travels. Some of the images are accidental, fortuitous shots taken in my wanderings. In others, they are a documentary record of friends and neighbours, people of whom I retain fond and meaningful memories, such as the Berber fishermen in the Moroccan desert or my neighbours in the little Peruvian village I lived near during some years.
Quoting Heraclitus, Plato reminds us that “you cannot step twice into the same river,” the passing water a metaphor for the implacable effect of the passage of time on all living beings. The people photographed in Passages over the course of forty years are no longer as they once were, indeed none of us is. The photographs preserve a moment that is gone.
