Narcissism

When I look at the photograph, many things occupy my mind. The photograph seems to be about photography. It seems to be about reflection. It speaks of a person looking at their own image in a photograph. And it speaks of the photographer looking at another. It is as though a child or a young girl is gazing at her own image in the water. And as though the photographer is watching this act of looking. The photograph reminds us of the myth of Narcissus, who became enamored of his own image in the water and gazed at it for so long that he died. Or perhaps the photograph has introduced a third person into the scene and wishes to say that the photographer has been a witness to this act of looking. The photograph’s incompleteness and fragmentation place before me so many “perhapses” and “as ifs.”

It is as though the photograph wanted to reveal something—or several things—to us, or perhaps wanted to conceal certain things.

We see two standing legs, as though they have paused, and we do not know whose head and body are supported by these two legs. And we see a body in the water, a tangled mass, headless and legless; the soft gray of the water and the streaked gray of the meadow, both incomplete and fragmentary, one more so than the other.

The photograph evades taking shape. Neither the quality of narcissism fully takes form nor does the photographer completely finish the image of their gaze. And our continual pleasure in looking, too, remains unfinished.