Photo Essay: Life is a Sculptor, Faces are Its Clay
Photo Essay: Life is a Sculptor, Faces are Its Clay
Street photography in Brighton Beach, New York.
It's an experimental (for me) photo essay… but why not?
Life is a patient sculptor. It carves its work on foreheads and cheeks in slow gestures of decades. It has a simple tool, a line in the skin, to tell the human story.
I see the sculptor’s work on faces passing me this afternoon. I am on a random corner of a street in Brighton Beach, New York, hidden in plain view behind the curtain of people’s inner thoughts, and worries, and hopes, and plans. The curtain clouds their vision, leaving only a peephole to see the tasks in front.
Almost no one sees me, a man with a camera, my back propped against the building wall, the eye of my lens studying the artwork of their faces, with only a rare glance in return. I see them better when I am unseen.
I see crow’s feet. They run from smiling eyes and speak of laughter, of times of joy when the levity won over and heaviness fell away. A family, a friend, a book, a pleasant thought brought on a smile which wrinkled the corners of the eyes. An ephemeral pattern then, but repeated across birthdays, dinner dates, weddings, births, and many firsts, the pattern is imprinted into permanence.
But these crow’s feet are markers of past joys. Life etched them long ago and they no longer speak of now. They run from temples to the wistful eyes darkened with the loss of someone forever gone. The deep wrinkles of unease cleave the spaces between eyebrows. Apostrophes — thin lines rounding the corners of the mouth — downturn and weigh the lips with hopes unmet.
In these faces, I see both the sorrow and the joy. The sculptor likes contrasts, accenting the work with oppositions. Deeper crow’s feet of laughter are in the company of deeper wrinkles of disquiet. Both are together on the face in a macabre balance demanded by the sculptor’s rules of composition.
The crevices of thought, intellect, curiosity, and skepticism stack up on the foreheads and pair with thoughtful eyes. These write good books.
I see a fine mesh, a web of lines. It envelops the cheeks without a clear meaning. Maybe it is wear, the fading of the vigor keeping faces taut? The marks of work, of stress, demanding kids, or irksome neighbors? Or wear from the sun, and wind, and rain? Or war?
I do not know. It could be a reflection of a tired soul or a cover for a sturdy spirit.
I see the smooth faces of the youth. No sign of the sculptor’s work, but she is already doing studies. In a decade, the first application of the sculpting clay will show in tiny smudges. The youth will fight. They are deluded by the thought that beauty is in the concealment. But the wiser know it is in the story written on the face.
If only I could stop each passerby and read the Braille of their wrinkled lines, I could fill anthologies of wisdom with prescriptions on how to save a soul, a world, a life, how to manage hate, and how to practice love. But I don’t know the language; it takes a lifetime to learn.
Thank you, Janice. I was surprised there was a working phone. Although, I do not know that it was working. The woman talked for a couple of minutes, however.
Nice captures Egor...Another common descriptor of those discerning lines of experience, the crows feet that the years bring, brought on by the joys, is laugh lines. I want mine to all be laugh lines... and of course they are not.
And is that woman on a pay phone??!! Fabulous. !!