My little one was sick this week.
Here he is, flying high at the circus, with his Dad and big brother, laughing, barely two years old, and that is one of my favorite pictures of him, even though you can hardly see him you feel him laughing flying, time suspended in joy.
Time.
This week he came ill, my little one because he will always be my little one, the youngest, a fever, gone as it came, unfathomable, random, as illnesses will be, and the anguish of being helpless, mostly, in the face of it.
This wasn’t anything serious, just the stuff of daily life raising children. This wasn’t anything to write about. Nothing much and I think of all of us in our vulnerability, of all the ones who are sick, dying, young and old, the unfairness and the agony, our cries. I think of the swan in Baudelaire’s poem of the same name I read again last week with a friend, the great white swan lost on dusty cobblestones looking in vain for water, crying to the sky, imploring God, “that great swan in its torment,” like “those who lose what never can be found again - never!”
And there it is: photography my shield against the passing of time, the passing of everything I love, and ultimately, because time passing is just that, against death. My fragile wall against the abyss, my daily struggle to hold on to what can never be found again. I take pictures to hold on to what I love but is already gone, to keep what is lovely and fair and can never be found again, to keep the trace of it, only a moment.
As far as I can remember I have had the feeling that time was running out, running running, our lives always against the clock and it is too late, and there I found in photography the only way I could deal with it, and with the oblivion that will come.
Nicolas felt better and went back to school, and I went back to my part-time job at a language immersion school, and the rest of our lives resumed.
In those two days I stayed home with him I had time to finish post-production work on a client’s pictures.
Time.
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