Obviously, she is his world. Her iris is his Universe. Her hand is the cure to all the world’s diseases. I like that about him.
“Him” is the photographer of the website I’m looking at. A collection of his photographs. The theme: the girl. It’s just “some girl” to his audience, but for him, it’s “the girl”. He almost dedicates his life to her. He dedicates his life to her because his life is a roll of film. I like that about him. This good Japanese twenty-something photographer.
The girl is everywhere. He photographs her in the most common locations. Against a wall. By the grass. Under the sun. Most of the photographs are taken in their home. The girl sitting on a kitchen stool, her feet propped up on the kitchen table, smoking. The girl, staring at him with a cup of coffee in her hand. THe girl by the docks. The girl asleep. The girl staring at her own reflection in the mirror… you can tell he is pleased to have caught his girl twice in the same frame.
Her hair is always over her face. She has short brown hair that is almost yellow in the sun. He likes her under the sun. But then again, he likes her in the shadows, too. Her bangs cover her eyes, making me realise that she doesn’t appreciate having her photograph taken all the time. And it’s obvious that he doesn’t care if she does. He’ll take her picture anyway, anywhere.
I can almost hear them talk.
“Yamamoto, stop it, take that camera away,” she’d say (of course, his name isn’t Yamamoto, I just made that up, and her name isn’t…)
“Mizuki, come on, don’t be difficult, now.”
She would then stomp her feet on the ground, and try to dodge Yamamoto and his camera. She’d run around him and he would never remove his lens from his eyes.
“Mizuki, really,” he’d admonish in his sternest tone. “Cut it out. You’re making me dizzy.”
“You,” she would then say, stopping right behind him, “are driving me crazy. Put that away for just one minute. Please?”
He smiles from behind his camera (from the pictures, he uses a Pentax, as it is photographed several times).
“You,” he would say loudly, “can never be captured enough on film. I was born to photograph you.” (I’m almost sure he’d say this to Mizuki!)
And she would bend her head, her bangs falling over her little Japanese face, and that is his photograph.
And so on and on I go, making up stories behind his photographs.
He pictures the edge of her pink polo shirt. Just a strip of pink cloth, leaning against a brown table. He takes a picture of a cigarette she has just put out on a finished papaya strip she’s just eaten… the tips of her fingers are barely in this shot, and still the photograph reeks of her. It’s filled with her. She’s not the most beautiful Japanese woman at first glance. She’s plain-looking, almost anorexic, cheeks deathly pale. But oh, how he makes her a goddess. And as you click through the photographs you can see that she is his eternal subject. And even though he takes pictures of other subjects —- a flower, architecture, even other women, he always links it to her. The Girl. The only person who throws him off-kilter, and the only true subject he would forever want trapped in his eye.
The last photograph is one of her under the snow. There is a lamppost over her head: the snow is almost silver. You can barely make her out, everything is set in an empty parking lot. It is nighttime. She wears layers of clothing, and as usual, her hair is over her face. But you can almost see her eyes. It is peeking at him, thus peeking at us. And I know why this photographer chose to place this as the last picture on his webpage. He knows that the viewer will get the whole point.
The point varies for everyone. But I assure you that I got his point. I understand why she is his muse. I understand what she can do to him.
I understand, because I am Asian, and I’ve never seen snow.
And looking at her photograph, looking into her eyes, I feel snow, and I feel so cold.
(I think I’ll be talking about photography in the next few days.)
