When the Images Find Each Other

One of the things I am learning about sequencing a photobook is not to force it.

Sometimes two photographs obviously belong together. A shared color, gesture, shape, or subject creates an immediate connection. But some of the most satisfying relationships reveal themselves only after I have lived with the images for a while.

I move photographs around. I try pairings. I separate them. I come back the next day and look again.

And sometimes, without really searching for it, something clicks.

That happened recently while sequencing Unstaged Paris. I had been sitting with two photographs that, on the surface, had very little in common. In one, two women sit together inside a café, seen through a window. One rests her face against her hand as she listens to the woman across from her. In the other, a woman sits alone on a small chair beside a Paris street, her hand raised toward her face in an almost identical gesture.

Suddenly, the connection was obvious.

It wasn't subject matter that brought the photographs together. It was gesture, mood, and contrast.

One image is about companionship; the other suggests solitude. One is enclosed in the warm interior of a café; the other is exposed to the street. One woman is absorbed in another person; the other seems absorbed in her own thoughts.

Yet that small, repeated gesture quietly binds the two photographs.

Once I saw it, the pairing felt almost inevitable.

This is one of the reasons I have come to enjoy sequencing nearly as much as making photographs. A photobook creates relationships that did not exist when the shutter was released. Two moments made independently—perhaps minutes or miles apart—can eventually find one another and create a third meaning that belongs to neither photograph alone.

But sometimes that relationship cannot be hurried.

The temptation is to keep moving things around until a solution appears. I am learning instead to sit with the work. To leave a sequence unresolved. To return to it later with fresh eyes.

Photographs have a strange way of revealing what they need when we give them enough time.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is simply keep looking.

Eventually, the images find each other.