In the studio · Photo essay
Why is our heart
furiously beating?
01 — The half-second before she decided to trust the lens.
There is a moment, just before a portrait works, when the heart speeds up — the photographer's and the subject's, both at once. It is not fear and it is not desire. It is the body recognising that something is about to be true.
Why does the heart insist on beating faster in front of certain faces, and stay quiet in front of the rest?
02 — Two strangers, photographed an hour apart. Only one of them looked back.
I have stopped trying to explain it to the people I photograph. When the heart starts up, I simply stop talking and let the room go quiet. The camera waits.
The machine cannot do this part, and I am glad. What it cannot do is sit across from a person at the exact moment they decide to be seen. That decision has a pulse. You can feel it in the room before you ever see it in the frame.
So we keep asking. Not to solve it — the heart is not a problem to be closed — but to stay close to the thing that still moves us, in a year when so much arrives already finished.
— Im Studio, München. MMXXVI.